Kingdom Hearts: Dawn of New Heroes
by LetherJacketCharizard
Summary: It's the future and the video game worlds are finally at peace... or ARE they? Join Venqas -Sora's son- Triana -Link's daughter- Turbo the Hedgehog -Sonic's son- and Koal -Spyro's daughter- on an epic adventure to different worlds in this exciting tale! United as one, there's no feat they can't accomplish! That is, if they CAN unite as one...
1. What fun is paradise?

**Kingdom Hearts: Dawn of New Heroes**

**ACT 1: RISE OF DARKNESS**

**Disclaimer: Due to the nature of this crossover fan-fiction, many different video game and some non-video game franchises will appear in this story. To avoid legal issues, I will be posting this disclaimer, as I do not own any of the franchises represented in this fanfiction. Note that not all the franchises listed here will actually appear in this story, but I am trying to cover my bases by adding a few extras, you know, just in case.  
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**I do not own, nor at any point claim to own any of the following franchises: _Kingdom Hearts, The Legend of Zelda, Sonic The Hedgehog, Spyro, Ratchet and Clank, Mega Man (or any of its spin-offs or sister series), Pokemon, Street Fighter, Team Fortress, Viewtiful Joe, Mario Bros., No More Heroes, Jak and Daxter, any characters owned by Marvel Comics, Final Fantasy, or any movies/properties owned by Disney._ The aforementioned franchises are the property of their respective creators/owners, and not me.**

**If I add a franchise to the fan-fiction that is not listed here, I will update this disclaimer in advance as an extra effort to avoid said legal issues.**

**This fan fiction is not for personal gain or profit it is merely for entertainment purposes. If there are any franchises that are in this fan fiction that were not mentioned here, I do not claim to own them either, but I will update the disclaimer as is necessary.**

_Introduction:_

It is now twenty years in the future and all the video game heroes have finally brought peace to their worlds, settled down and had children. A good many changes can happen during two whole decades. On the surface, the worlds seem peaceful, without any use for war or hate or evil.

However, darkness is not so easily eliminated, and still finds ways to seep into impure hearts. Now, after twenty years of waiting, evil and darkness reunite to squeeze the life out of these peaceful worlds and crush them into oblivion along with anyone who would have the spark to oppose them. However, even when all seems lost, a light will always shine to cut through the darkness.

**Chapter 1: Triana, the Hylain Princess**

I have grown up in a castle for as long as I can remember. Daughter of the savior of Hyrule and the ruler of all the land, a princess being waited on hand and foot by servants. Day in and day out. I sound like the lucky sort, right? Well, I am, at least in theory. I am Triana, princess of Hyrule and daughter of King Link and Queen Zelda. And I am also, very, very bored.

I grew up hearing stories of my father –Link, the greatest warrior the world has ever known- and how he defeated the forces of darkness and restored peace to the land. As unlikely as it sounds for a princess, I am quite jealous of my father. My dreams often linger on adventures and heroics such as his. But the closest I've come to that is swinging a fencing sword around. Don't get me wrong, that's fun and all, but I still wish I could experience thrills beyond those boundaries. I understand his point of view -he would never forgive himself were I to fall in battle- but, it's so annoying being treated as defenseless!

My mother -Queen Zelda- has given me slightly more leeway, educating me in the use of magic. Unfortunately, she has refused to teach me any offensive spells, simply a defensive shield called Nayru's Love and a teleportation spell called Farore's Wind. Talk about _boring_...

I pass the time by reading books -my only companions. I also enjoy writing to an extent. My dream is to leave this stupid castle and go on an adventure, chronicling my travels in writing so they would never be forgotten. But bravery and intelligence are aspects unbecoming of a princess. Were that I could only find an excuse -any excuse- to set out on a real adventure.

**Chapter 2: Venqas, the Ordinary Dude**

My name's Venqas. Strange name, I know. Don't get too excited -I'm no one special. Just a teenager with spiky hair who lives on a world we call the Destiny Islands. Why is it called that? Well, they say that a magical fruit known as the paopu Fruit grows on the islands. And get this -they say if two people share them, they'll become intertwined with each other's destiny, remaining a part of each other, no matter what.

To me, that sounds like a load of bull. What, do the fruits have the power to change the future? Maybe it's some glorified fairytale that lovers tell to impress each other before sharing a fruit. I'm guessing it must taste really good, but I have no intention of finding out. I mean, what if you shared it with someone and then grew to hate them? You'd be screwed! Or maybe it's an old part of a ceremony at a wedding or something, but ah hell, what do I care? I guess I just got nothin' else worth thinking about.

You'd be surprised how dull it is here. My parents try to spice things up, but I really don't care. I guess I just don't feel special because I haven't done anything special -which at the moment, suits me just fine. My dad keeps telling me that all you need to succeed is to dream, but every time he says that, I have to shake my head and ask him if he actually believes what he's saying. One thing's for sure, I sure don't.

**Chapter 3: Turbo the Hedgehog, the Second Fastest Thing Alive**

They call me Turbo, and it's a fitting name; I'm one of those guys who likes the rush -just running faster and faster. Got a problem with that, punk? Oh, before I go on, I should probably mention that I'm not a normal guy. Put simply, I'm Sonic the Hedgehog's son. Nothin' normal 'bout me. I'm a 100% bona-fide, guaranteed, supersonic hedgehog! You might not be from around here and be wondering, "supersonic hedgehog? What the heck is that?" Well, here's the deal, I'm like, half-hedgehog, half human, even though DNA-wise, I'm all hedgehog. Yeah, there are guys like me, animal-people I mean. Not just hedgehogs, there's also foxes, birds, cats, echidnas (assuming you know what those are) and a bunch of others, each with our own special powers!

But it gets kinda lonely sometimes. My father's always on the run, so I never get to see him much. I live with my mother Amy Rose. She's a pink hedgehog, who may not be as fast as my father but she makes up for it with other powers like hammer summoning and Tarot card reading that actually works. Speaking of which, I've got BOTH Sonic AND Amy's powers... heh heh... you get the general idea, I'm a one-man, er-hedgehog-demolition derby! Too bad everything's always so peaceful. No bad guys to fight, no danger around, NOTHING. I just want to use my powers to do something, but I'm too young and it's too quiet! ARRRGHH!... Are you still here?

**Chapter 4: Koal The Dragon**

Hey. My name's Koal. I'm a dragon with black scales, a pink belly, yellow horns and a purple stripe going down my back. I'm not all that different from anyone else around here, just a bunch of dragons- well, there's also some midget-moles and warrior cheetahs. Nothing I would call "out of the ordinary".

I'm a pretty average girl- except for the fact that I have famous parents, so there's _that_. My mom and dad are revered heroes who saved the whole realm, defeated the greatest evil the world has ever known, restored dragons to their rightful glory –the list goes on for longer than I have the patience to recount. I'd be shocked if you hadn't heard their story, everyone has- if you haven't you're either deaf or have been happily living under a rock for the past twenty years. But the funny thing is that when they did all that heroic stuff I mentioned earlier, they weren't that much older than I am.

Being their _esteemed _daughter, I've been developing the powers that they have –with agonizing slowness that is. You may be wondering what kind of powers I'm talking about. If that's the case whoever educated you about dragons obviously didn't do a very good job. Dragons have the ability to project the elements of nature through their breath and each dragon is in tune with a single element, such as fire, ice, electricity or earth. My father, however is a purple dragon -a rare breed of dragon that can command multiple elements. And it gets EVEN better, my mother had something done to her -that she always changes the subject whenever I ask her about- which gave her access to a variety of darker elements such as poison, fear, wind and shadow. Yeah, I'm _pretty average_, huh?

But as I mentioned earlier, contrary to popular belief, I am not as powerful as the two of them combined. As annoying as it is, the only breath elements I've actually been able to develop so far are fire, electricity and poison… They're good enough for now -not that I've had the chance to try them out in battle. Obviously, my parents chose to live in a nice, safe haven of a city -rather than somewhere "exciting" like a swamp or a wasteland. But in hindsight, that's probably for the best. Imagine, _me_ -the daughter of the two greatest heroes in the world- _fighting _using my powers. Some imagination I've got, right?

**Writer's Notes:**

I just want to say that writing the backstories for these four characters was much harder than I thought it would be. I'm not very suited to writing in the first-person, so the story will be third-person from here on out.

Also, a HUGE thanks to GoldenGriffeness for helping me edit this part, multiple times. If you liked what you saw here, I would strongly recommend that you check out her stories.


	2. Trouble in Paradise

**Chapter 5: A Call To Action**

Triana sat at the desk in her room, writing her thoughts in a journal which were -as always- _bored_. Long had she waited in the castle for excitement, but nothing had come. It was a full moon this night, and Triana had noticed that she felt different during a full moon. But it was still nothing worth writing about.

Suddenly, she heard a thunderous roar coming from the throne room. Triana sprang up and ran to the door. She could hear the sound of a battle being fought, swords clashing, magic crackling, monsters roaring. This she _had_ to see.

As Triana made her way to the throne room, the suspicious lack of guards made her smile. No one was going to "escort" her back to her room. She arrived at the throne room's open door to find her parents clashing their swords with a warrior who was...

_NO!_

Triana fell back against the wall in disbelief. The intruder's green skin and long nose, his red hair and that black armor... It was Ganondorf -the evil sorcerer who had attempted to bring Hyrule into the twilight realm all those years ago. But that couldn't be right–Triana's father had slain Ganondorf in battle! Yet the attacker now bore no scars, no wounds, as if he had never been dead to begin with. Triana peeked back at the battle.

Ganondorf leaped away from Link and Zelda and fired what appeared to be streams of black lightning at them. Even Link's shield and Zelda's magic could not stop the attack, and they froze in place as they were struck by the sinister bolts. As they fell to their knees, Ganondorf began to boast-

"Bwah, ha, ha! Fools!" The evil wizard approached his fallen foes, gloating the whole way. "Your powers have deteriorated with time. Now I, _Ganondorf_, will rule Hyrule with an iron fist!"

"H-how the hell are you still alive?" Link grunted, his strength fading fast. "I...killed you...all those years ago..."

"I was resurrected." Ganon smirked. "And now, at your weakest, I have defeated you and Princess Zelda!"

"Go ahead and destroy us, monster..." Zelda growled. "I do not fear death. Even if you destroy us, our memory shall live on!"

"Oh, I have something _much_ more painful in mind for the both of you..."

"Well I don't intend to hear it!" Triana called, rushing in and grabbing her father's weapon. Ganon snapped his fingers and a pulse of darkness flung Triana to the ground.

"A child?" Ganon inquired. "So, you had an offspring to take your place were you to fall?"

"Triana, run!" Link commanded. "You can't fight him! He's impossible to defeat!"

"No, I've dreamed of a call to action like this my whole damn life!" Triana roared, her blood boiling hotter than the lava of Death Mountain. "This is the moment I've dreamed about! A fight where–" Ganon released another pulse of darkness to keep Triana on the ground.

"Foolish girl..." Ganon grinned, turning his attention to Link and Zelda. "Now, let's see how your memory will live on once you both finish defiling it!" Link and Zelda felt something begin to change inside of them. They were slowly overtaken by a dark power, transforming into what could only be described as werewolves.

"Mother...Father..." Triana wheezed in horror. Her blood froze as she watched them howl and grunt, little more than shadows of their former selves.

"They are my slaves now," Ganondorf proclaimed. "And you shall follow!" He fired a stream of black lightning at Triana, making her scream as she felt the agony of having her flesh pierced by a thousand poison-tipped arrows. Suddenly, a figure in a brown cloak appeared out of nowhere between Triana and Ganondorf and caught the lightning with his bare hand.

"What sorcery is this?" Ganon exclaimed.

"Damn good sorcery." The figure quipped. He grabbed Triana by the arm and spirited away with her in a blinding flash of light.

"What was_ that?_!" Ganondorf demanded.

ooOoo

Triana and the mysterious stranger appeared in the fields outside of Hyrule.

"Wh-who are you?" Triana gasped, trying to catch her breath.

She was feeling distinctly odd. A flash of light and the whole world shifted. Pain washed over her. Her golden-brown hair faded to silver and began to explode all over her body, wrapping her in a blanket of fur.

She fell on all fours, looking in horror as her hands were covered by the same silver coat that dominated the rest of her body. Her sky-blue eyes were the only hint that she had ever been human. Those eyes opened wide, clouded with confusion and shock.

"What's-what's happened to me?" She gasped past teeth sharp as knives. Triana found herself peering past a long snout. A hundred odors overwhelmed her, making it even harder for her to think.

She felt an odd weight near her backside. Turning her revealed a tail! She then realized that the lightning had turned her into a silver-coated wolf. "What–I–Um–"

"No...this will _not_ do." The cloaked figure grumbled. "This isn't going to help one bit."

"What's going on? Who are you? What's happened to me?"

"I am simply known as the Herald." The figure stated. "My real name, you would not recognize. I am a warrior who seeks to keep the peace. I was warned of an upcoming threat, and I knew that I had to rescue you–"

"Why _me_?" Triana snarled. "Why not my parents?"

"My means of transportation is not instantaneous." The Herald stated. "I arrived too late for that, but more to the point, I was instructed to rescue _you_."

"Again, _why_?"

"Because you are the one who can undo Ganondorf's evil." The Herald stated. "Is that not what you've always wanted? A call to action?"

"How can I do _anything_ like this?" Triana called attention to her new lupine form. "More to the point, how can you understand me while I'm a wolf?"

"I can understand the dialect of any creature, even a wolf." The Herald seemed irritatingly nonchalant about Triana's predicament.

"So, other people won't be able to understand me now that I'm a wolf?" Triana's worries were rising, as was her frustration. The Herald held out his hand, displaying a golden amulet with a flat, blue gem on a metal chain.

"If you wear this amulet, your words will be translated into the languages of others." The Herald fitted it around Triana's neck. "Ergo, they will be able to understand you, even if you're a wolf."

"Even _if _I'm a wolf?" Triana was becoming increasingly confused. It felt like her head was about to explode because this stupid stranger was being so goddamn cryptic!

"As far as I can tell, the transformation shouldn't be permanent." The Herald explained. "You will resume human form upon contact with the morning sun. But be warned, under the illumination of the midnight moon, you shall revert to this form."

"Great, so I'm going to be jumping back and forth between these forms every time the sun changes? Swell..."

"Do not fret." The Herald chuckled. "Your father grew accustomed to a wolf form during his adventures, and so shall you."

"That's encouraging..." Triana grunted. All of a sudden, the sun began to creep up over the mountain tops. The sunlight bathed Triana in an aura of golden warmth. Her head began to ring, the gray fur that once engulfed her retreated, showing her skin once again. She let out a howl as her paws reverted to hands, her tail vanished and her hair changed from a moonlight silver to an autumn gold. She stood upright once again and sighed with relief. "Well, it's great to be me again," She remarked, inspecting her human form. Despite only being a wolf for a few hours, she felt like it had been forever since she was a human. She noticed that her father's sword was on the ground -she was still holding it when the Herald teleported her away. She took it in her hand and inspected it -her reflection shone brilliantly in the sword.

"Come with me..." The Herald said. "You will soon discover that you have what it takes to be a hero..."

**Chapter 6: Darkness**

Venqas walked a lonely road home from school. He was becoming bored of this daily grind, but he didn't see anything else better in his future.

The sky began to turn an ominous purple, which couldn't help but remind him of in animes, where that was an obvious sign that something bad was about to happen. He arrived at his house, to find that it had been utterly and completely demolished, as if by some evil force of unimaginable power.

"What the hell?" He exclaimed, dropping his bookbag in shock. He ran up to the ruins of his house, to find the most unexpected thing -his parents were fighting off swarms of black monsters with what appeared to be...giant keys? Whatever they were, they made damn good swords. His father hacked apart monster after monster with two of these key-swords in hand. His mother simply mowed down any that came after her with a single key-sword. His parents called to each other,

"Sora, what's going on? I thought the Heartless were gone!"

"So did I, but it looks like I was wrong!"

"What do we do?"

"Keep mowing 'em down! We've got no other choice!"

"What in the world is going on?" Venqas thought. All of a sudden, a man in a black cloak emerged from a black portal of darkness.

"Organization XIII?" Venqas' father exclaimed. "B-but I KILLED all of you!"

"You missed one." The mysterious man quipped. All of a sudden, Venqas' parents were trapped by chains of darkness that sprung from their very shadows.

"MOM! DAD!" Venqas called. All eyes turned to him. "Well that was a dumb idea..." He reflected upon his outburst.

"See? I told you we should have gotten him fencing lessons for a day like today!" Ven's father called to his wife, as if gloating

"Okay, I was wrong." Ven's mother admitted.

"What's going on?" Venqas demanded.

"It is none of your concern." The black-coat man asserted.

"They're my parents! Damn right, it's my concern!"

"I'm sorry we never told you about this son..." Ven's father apologized.

"Heartless, he doesn't leave!" The black coat man roared. The black monsters turned their attention to Venqas. As they lunged, Venqas' parent's weapons began to glow. All of a sudden, they appeared in front of Venqas and slashed the monsters in half before they could do their bidding. The black coat man disappeared into a black portal with Ven's parents. More black monsters appeared, all with the full intention of killing Ven. The three key-swords floated in front of Ven. He grabbed two of them, but the third appeared to float on a will of his own.

He took a deep breath and then scowled at the monsters, "...Okay... bring it!"


	3. Assemble

**Chapter 7: The Battle Royale**

Triana and the Herald approached a rock formation in the Hyrule fields. The blazing sun was offset by chilling winds, which did not please Triana, but the Herald did not seem to notice the cold at all.

"So, what am I doing?" Triana was now decked out in a more heroic garb -she wore a green tunic and skirt, a green cap, brown leather boots and gloves and a scabbard with her father's master sword. The Herald placed his hand upon the rock formation and it opened like a door to reveal a cave.

"This will be your first test. Enter the cave and vanquish the foes within. Pass the test and you will earn something invaluable to completing your mission."

"Can't you give it to me now?" Triana didn't like to beat around the bush, rather take a machete to it and be done with it.

"This cannot be given, only earned." The Herald was as helpful and specific as usual. "Now go!"

Triana entered the cave. The consuming darkness filled her with pretense. What would these foes be? Would they be human, animal or something much worse? As she neared the end, there was a blinding light-

Triana found herself in what appeared to be a big clearing with a hole in the top of the cave, causing the golden high-noon sun to pour in. There was a babbling stream below a stone scaffolding suspended in chains, which Triana stood upon. She took a moment to take in the beauty of the locale.

"...Wait, what am I doing?" Triana caught herself before she drifted too far off. "I'm here to fight! But where are my opponents?" All of a sudden, in another blinding light, she saw what were to be her foes standing on the other three corners of the scaffolding. One was a boy about Triana's age -perhaps a year or two older- with spiky brown hair a white tunic and blue, baggy pants. Another was a small black, pink and purple dragon of some sort. The third was what appeared to be a sleek blue, humanoid hedgehog with three pink quills on his forehead pointing out. Five pink and blue quills hung out from the back of his head like a hair style. He wore starch white gloves and red running shoes, cementing himself as the oddest of the bunch.

"Where am I?" Asked the boy with the spiky hair as he looked around, puzzled.

"Sure is pretty here..." The dragon remarked. The voice would indicate that the dragon was female. "Okay, enough of that-"

"Yo, let's skip the introductions!" The hedgehog-man brashly exclaimed in an almost-cartoonish voice. "I'm Turbo The Hedgehog, and you're all going down!" This creature's boasting made it clear to Triana that this was a battle royale, meaning that all combatants were against one another, not just her.

"Don't be so sure..." The boy with the spiky hair said. Out of nowhere materialized three giant key-like weapons that floated around his body. The dragon began to breathe fire out of her nostrils and Triana drew her Master Sword.

The hedgehog curled up into a ball, spun like a wheel for a moment and then dashed forward at Triana. She quickly dove out of the way, causing the hedgehog to skid, trying to avoid falling into the waters below.

The dragon began to breathe a cloud of smoke to camouflage itself. The boy with the key-like weapons charged at Triana and swung the swords at her. As Triana and her foes' blades clashed, her foe took a moment to observe her visage,

"Hey... uh... you're kinda cute."

"Uh...Really?" Triana had never been hit on before, so she didn't really know how to feel. Her cheeks turned a rosy red and she kicked her rival away. "Ulp... that was awkward...Rrr... Pull it together, Triana! He's trying to mess with your head!" Triana was now of the realization that being the least impressive of the bunch, she was obviously the target here. The dragon swooped in and attempted to attack the boy with the key-like weapons.

"No! G-Get away from me!" The spiky-haired boy screamed, trying to hold the dragon back with his key weapons. All of a sudden, the hedgehog reappeared out of nowhere, brandishing a humongous hammer and slammed the dragon into a cave wall.

"Never played 'whack-a-dragon' before but..." The hedgehog quipped, flashing a smug grin. Triana was baffled. Jokes at a time like this? Was he insane? The boy with the spiky hair struck the hedgehog with his keys, hurling him to the edge of the scaffolding, hanging by only his fingers. Now it was just Triana and the key-weapons boy.

**Chapter 8: The Mission**

Triana and her foe slashed at each other. While her foe had more weapons than her, he was obviously less than a novice at using them. She on the other hand only had one weapon, but was quite competent with a blade. As they clashed, Triana felt like berating her foe, if just to undermine his confidence.

"What are you fighting for?" She screamed. "Why are you doing this?" She expected her foe to feel as flustered as she, but he suddenly halted his attacks.

"Because..." The boy began to relent with his attacks, using his weapons to block one of Triana's blows, "Imagine having a good life. Not a care in the world. Then imagine some stupid bastard just coming out of nowhere and taking it from you -your home, your parents..." He began to shed tears. "Everything..." Triana stopped attacking. This boy wasn't any different than she, he'd lost everything too, and that was worth not killing him over.

"Actually, if you can believe it, that's the same thing that happened to me..."

"Really?"

"Yeah. If it hadn't been for the Herald, I can't imagine where I'd be right now."

"Wait, you know the Herald?" The spiky-haired boy inquired. "Strange dude with a cloak?"

"Well, yeah." Triana confirmed. "He's the one who sent me into this cave to fight you and those other two."

"Hold on -he sent ME here to fight you and those other two!"

"Hold on!" The dragon gasped, getting up. "He sent me here too! To do the same exact thing!"

"Same here!" The hedgehog called from the edge of the scaffolding.

"So wait... he played us all against each other?" The spiky-haired boy asked, beginning to put the pieces together.

"Looks like..." The dragon growled.

"So we're not the enemy, HE is!" Triana exclaimed. "Which means..." The edge the blue hedgehog was holding onto crumbled and he fell into the river below. He began to wail and thrash about,

"Help me! Please! I can't swim!"

"Oh no!" Triana gasped. "He's going to drown!"

"Not if I can help it!" The dragon snarled. She took flight and swooped down, grasping the hedgehog in her claws. "I got you!" She grunted, hoisting him up to the scaffolding.

"(cough)(cough)...Thanks, I thought I was a goner..." The hedgehog wheezed as the dragon laid him down.

"So now we know that snake-in-the-grass, the Herald is the bad guy!" Triana asserted.

"Am I now?" The Herald said in a sarcastic tone, appearing before the four warriors.

"You! You played us against one-another!" The spiky-haired boy accused. "You told us all it was a test, but in reality, it was a way to get us to destroy each other!"

"To the contrary, you have all passed the test better than I could have hoped." The Herald stated. "The test was to get you all to realize you all have a common goal -to save your worlds and those you care about."

"You couldn't have just introduced us?" The dragon asked, not amused in the slightest.

"That wouldn't have been as fun or as interesting, and none of you would have learned a thing."

"So, our safety is superseded by our entertainment value?" Triana asked.

"It may sound like I'm manipulating you, but I must tell you all this -your worlds have fallen to the forces of evil, and it is your task to ensure that the same does not happen to other worlds." The Herald explained. "You all have your gifts and abilities- Triana, the mystical warrior princess of Hyrule; Venqas, the heir to the keyblades; Turbo The Hedgehog, the supersonic, supernatural woodland rodent; And Koal, the daughter of the purple dragon Spyro and the black dragon Cynder. You all possess your parent's abilities and more. Together, you will work to save the universe." The four warriors stared at him with their jaws dropped in disbelief.

"Hold on, hold on, hold on..." Turbo interjected. "OTHER WORLDS?"

"SAVE THE UNIVERSE?" Triana exclaimed.

"WORK TOGETHER?" Venqas gasped.

"He lost me on 'and more.'" Koal stated.

"We're supposed to be this super-team assembled to stop the bad guys from taking over the universe?" Venqas scoffed.

"Sounds good to me!" Turbo the Hedgehog grinned. "I'm raring for a fight!"

"But wait, why choose us?" Triana asked. "What makes us so special?"

"Hell if I know." The Herald shrugged. "My master insisted on it. But be assured, I would have saved your parents if I had the chance, but obviously I'm at the very least sub-par at doing optional tasks."

"More like completely sucking at it..." Koal grunted.

"Your master?" Triana asked.

"Is there an echo in here?" The Herald stabbed with his obviously sharp tongue.

"YES!" Everyone snapped, startling bats all throughout the cave.

"Now, about your master..." Triana said.

"He is mysterious, and prefers to keep to the shadows." The Herald stated. "But I serve him in the greater interest of the world order, which our little group is now completely violating. But as has been proven by Venqas' father, such trivialities can be overlooked if enough is on the line."

"My father?" Venqas asked.

"All in due time..."

**Writer's Notes:**

Triana's line "So our safety is superseded by our entertainment value?" actually made me wonder- am I making my characters self-aware of their existence?... Nah! But still, I actually wrote a line that would be relevant if spoken to me by the character. Scary, huh?

**Chapter 9: I couldn't think of an interesting title, so I put this here instead, sue me.  
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Triana, Koal, Turbo and Venqas exited the cave that Triana had entered the mountain through. They all store at each other for a while, perplexed by the prospect of them all being from different worlds, much less the fact that they were supposed to work together to save other worlds.

Turbo was the first to speak up. "So, who the heck ARE you guys?" He was bold, rude and impulsive, but this was hardly surprising for someone named for his speed. "Okay, I'll go first." Turbo's allies were still confused by his outlandish appearance. "I'm Turbo the Hedgehog."

"Um, last I checked, hedgehogs didn't look like you do." Venqas remarked.

"Yeah, what ARE you?" Koal inquired.

"I'm a super-sonic hedgehog from Mobius!" Turbo boasted. "Back there we got all sorts of guys like me."

"Do they all run as fast as you?" Triana inquired, curious of this odd creature, and at the same time wishing she could've been turned a half-animal-half-person by Ganondorf instead of a full wolf.

"Well most of them can run pretty fast, but _nowhere_ near as fast as me!" The blue hedgehog added 'conceited' to the list of appropriate words to describe him. "I top out at about mach one."

Koal smirked, "So the only thing that runs faster than your mouth are your legs?"

"Well, what makes _you _so special, scaly?" Turbo's quills were sharp, but not as sharp as his tongue.

"I can breathe fire and spit poison." Koal rebutted, "And I can also do those in the _literal_ sense."

"Point for the dragon." Venqas grinned,

"Are there other dragons where you're from?" Triana asked, being the only one not interested in swapping blows with her wits.

"You're joking, right?" Koal scoffed. "My world's called the _Dragon Realms_." Koal turned her head to the side, "(well, it _WAS_...)"

"What was that?"

"Oh, nothing. So, where are you from, Triana?"

"I'm from Hyrule... which I believe we're still in..." Triana for the first time realized that they were back in Hyrule field, which puzzled her as to why the Herald would send her here as opposed to one of her new friend's worlds.

"And what's your story?" Venqas asked.

"Well, if you can believe it, I'm the princess of this land."

"Really?" Koal asked, surprised that Triana was a princess who could hold her own in a fight.

"Heh, yeah right." Turbo chuckled with a smug grin. "And _I'm_ an alien with glowing golden spiky hair, if you can believe it." Triana clenched her teeth, annoyed by this loud-mouthed rodent.

"Cut it out, Turbo!" Venqas snapped. "We're all really frustrated right now and you're not helping!"

"Okay, okay..." Turbo acquiesced. "I'll stop... for now."

"Thank you, Venqas." Triana said to the spiky haired boy.

"Uh... No problem, uh... your highness..." It became immediately apparent that Venqas had no idea how to talk to girls, much less royalty.

"You don't have to call me anything special." Triana didn't want her teammates to treat her like royalty. She'd always wanted to feel more like a normal person, as opposed to a pampered princess. "What's your story?"

"Well... I, uh..." Venqas felt a temptation to make up something wild, but resisted the urge. "I'm just a normal guy, nothing to say, really."

"What about those giant house keys you club people with?" Turbo inquired.

"They're called Keyblades. Or at least that's what the Herald told me. They were a hand-me-down from my parents. Which is to say that they gave them to me before being swallowed up by the darkness." Venqas hung his head in disdain of the memory of that painful night. All eyes turned to Turbo,

"What? You think I'm gonna make some sick joke about that? I might be insensitive, but I have boundaries."

"Well, that much is good." Koal rolled her eyes. She turned to Venqas, "I'm sorry, but I can't get over how you screamed when I attacked you back there."

"If a fire-breathing, poison-fanged beast was trying to tear out _your_ jugular, how would you respond?" Venqas countered.

"I'd eat it." Koal smirked.

"I'd kick it away." Triana added.

"I'd use my hammer to beat on its skull until I got pancakes." Turbo quipped. He glanced up to notice the sun setting. "Little early for the sun to be setting, isn't it?"

"We should set up camp here for the night." Koal asserted.

"Sun...setting?" Triana's eyes blazed open, remembering what the Herald told her. "Oh crap..."


	4. Better on Paper

**Chapter 10: Reflections by the campfire**

In the fields outside of Hyrule, the four heroes had set up camp for the night. Triana's change into a wolf had startled her friends, but this was nothing compared to the shock they had endured these past few days.

A fire surrounded by stones glimmered and danced in the center of four logs that had been cut by Triana's master sword. Koal sat near the fire, as if to admire her breath's handywork. Triana stumbled to Koal's side, awkwardly trying to settle herself. She cursed her wolf form, how was she supposed to walk on _four_ legs, never mind the tail and uncomfortable fur.

Watching the poor thing stumble and wobble around, Koal sighed and extended her pink, bat-like wing to the wolf-girl, guiding her next to her and gingerly pushing her belly to the ground. Triana flinched for a moment before realizing that she was actually _comfortable_, which was a surprise to find she _could _feel comfortable like this. Everything in this body was different -almost alien. Her eyes sparkled in the ruby glow of the fire, seeming almost feral -which was a direct contrast to the poor changeling's true demeanor. Her eyes flitted to Venqas -cheeks glowing red hot beneath her silky gray fur.

Koal looked over to her companion, her topaz-yellow eyes sparking with mischief. "You like him, don't you?" Koal grinned, the fire making her pink scales glow like her namesake.

Triana flinched, realizing she was staring and whipped her head around, having never felt more guilty in her life. "Uh..."

"Smooth..." Koal smirked, taking pleasure in this.

"Well..." Triana glanced at her hands, err- paws. _Damn it, she couldn't even name her own anatomy_. "Well, he's cute! Don't you think he is?"

Koal laughed, "I dunno- take some glue and shove on a few scales- a wing here and there, a couple little things called courage and common sense- and then maybe- _maybe._"

Triana smiled before remembering what she had just said to Koal, "Um... in any case... please don't tell him I said that."

"Your secret is safe... for now."

Meanwhile, Venqas and Turbo conferred on the prospect of this mission of theirs.

"So, we're a team now. Pretty exciting, huh?" Turbo was ecstatic about finally getting to save the world, er, _worlds_.

"Actually, I'm not ready for this." Venqas rubbed the back of his head. "This is too much -too fast."

"Fast?" Turbo chuckled. "Dude, I'm the second-fastest thing alive! You want fast-"

"No, you stupid rat-boy!" Venqas snapped, his patience on the brink along with his sanity. "Look at what's happened to me! My parents were these kinds of- of- key-swinging warriors! My parents might be dead now! My world is gone! Swallowed by the darkness! And who are my new 'best friends?' A she-dragon, a girl who turns into a wolf and a fricking blue porcupine with running shoes and a pink mohawk!"

"Dude, calling me a porcupine is like calling you a shaved gorilla!" Turbo exploded.

"Hey, I'm not ready for this!" Venqas barked. "I wasn't waiting for an adventure my whole life and I sure-as-hell ain't prepared to fight a war against interdimensional villains!"

"Well you'd better be ready, or you'll be joining your parents soon enough." Koal asserted, approaching the two. "I didn't want to be a warrior, but I was chosen to save the universe, so that's my path."

"But you're a dragon, I'm just a guy."

"If the Herald chose you to be on this team, you're obviously more than 'just a guy'." Triana countered. "We're all the offspring of heroes, and we're the last hope our worlds have. Yours might be lost, but does that really mean you're willing to let those of others be put in peril?"

"I'm not cut out for this!" Venqas snapped. "I'm not _like_ any of you! I wasn't born into this! I don't have any special powers!"

"Then what are you going to do?" Koal asked. "Your world is history; you've got nowhere to go! WE'VE got nowhere to go! From what the Herald told us, our options are limited to 'fight' or 'get eaten by little blobs of darkness'. You can't back out. This wasn't your choice, but you can make the best of it."

"Yeah, don't you wanna get some payback on the bad guys?" Turbo asked. "Your world gets swallowed up by darkness, you cut the darkness to ribbons!"

"...I'll need some time to think about it." Venqas laid down, tired from this exhausting ordeal.

"Yeah..." Koal yawned. "We'd better rest up... Tomorrow's a big day... or so I assume."

**Chapter 11: Divided We Stand**

Morning crept up over the mountain range. Triana reverted to human form, startling her once more. It seemed that just as she had gotten used to the change, she was changed back and left to get re-acquainted with her body. Koal began to yawn as she awoke. Triana was captivated by how adorable Koal was when she was tired, like a little puppy. That could fly and breathe fire.

"Whatzup?" Koal muttered, half-awake. She glanced over the fire pit, to find that the boys were nowhere to be seen! "Where's Ven and Turbo?"

"I'm right here!" Turbo proclaimed, rushing up, almost out of nowhere.

"Whoa!" Triana exclaimed, startled by the hedgehog's speed. His name might have been Turbo, but she didn't expect him to be THAT fast.

"Yeah, I decided to get up early and do some jogging..." Turbo noticed the girls were shooting him looks that marked him as irresponsible, "...Uh, I mean _recon_!"

"Where's Venqas?" Koal asked.

"I thought he'd left to go to the bathroom or get more firewood." Turbo shrugged. "He STILL ain't back?"

"He must have ditched us!" Koal growled.

"All that talk about not being cut out for this..." Triana recounted. "It should have been obvious he was going to run away. We need to find him before he gets in trouble."

"I can cover more ground by flying." Koal offered.

"And I can run fast to cover even more ground." Turbo added.

"Don't bother." Venqas approached the heroes. "I _was _gonna split, but then I realized that I really _do_ have nowhere to go."

"You were gonna abandon us?" Koal accused, fearing treachery at the worst.

"I changed my mind." Venqas countered.

"Dude, you can't just run off." Turbo asserted. Triana fell down laughing from the irony of that statement.

"Look, I'm gonna hang with you guys since I've got nowhere else to go." Venqas sighed.

"Then it is settled." The Herald appeared out of nowhere.

"Cripes!" Turbo gasped, startled by the sudden appearance of the cloaked figure.

"What do you want?" Triana asked, getting up off the ground.

"To give you all your first mission." The Herald stated. "You are to invade Hyrule and take it back from Ganondorf."

"Ganondorf?" Venqas inquired, unsure of whether to shutter in fear or laugh at the ridiculousness of the name.

"He's an evil sorcerer." Triana explained. "And he's also the bastard who took over my home and enslaved my parents."

"So, how we gonna do this?" Turbo asked, doing warm-up exercises. "Head-on assault? Air raid? Slip in in a disguise?"

"Gonna be pretty hard to disguise you and Koal." Venqas observed. "Turbo could pass if we put a hood on him, but Koal..."

"Actually, you will all need to decide that amongst yourselves." The Herald stated. "This is your first real battle, and as such, it is not my place to be barking orders at you."

"You're gonna get us eff-ing killed!" Venqas snapped. "It's us versus a kingdom AND an evil warlock!"

"I am afraid that I cannot meddle in the affairs of a world I am not from."

"But that's ALL you've done for the past twenty-four hours!" Triana countered.

"Well... you can't have me holding your hands the entire time."

"This is our first mission, and you can't just tag along to-" The Herald had vanished before Koal could finish her sentence. "-Damn it."

"Okay, since this is Triana's home we're invading, she should spearhead the operation." Venqas asserted, readying himself for the mission.

"R-really? Okay!" Triana was excited for the chance to lead a real battle.

"What's the plan?" Koal asked.

"Well, we're gonna need someone to scout ahead." Triana stated.

"That's my job!" Turbo grinned, as if calling dibs. "With my speed, I'll be there and back before anyone knew I was there at all!"

"Actually, I was thinking Koal could scout better, since she can fly." Triana stated.

"And people wouldn't think a dragon flying around is a little... Strange?" Ven inquired.

"Better than an anthropomorphic hedgehog."

"I'm not 'anthropomorphic'!" Turbo snapped, assuming it an insult. "...whatever that means..."

"Believe me, if you weren't anthropomorphic, you'd be a LOT less annoying." Koal grinned.

"...Okay, now that was uncalled for..." Turbo muttered. "I think."

"So, we have Koal scout out the streets..." Triana stated, drawing a diagram in the dirt with a stick. "And when we know what we're up against, we have Turbo blast in and use his speed to distract the guards. Then Ven and I will slip in and go after that asshole warlock!"

"Um, not that it isn't a good plan, but maybe Turbo and I should handle Ganondorf." Koal suggested.

"No, that monster must pay by my hand!" Triana shook her fist in fury at the mere thought of that monster.

"And note that you and Ven are the two weakest of the four of us." Turbo added to Koal's case.

"And also the least experienced with your skills." Koal agreed. "Leave the warlock-killing to the ones with powers and you two just... make out or something."

"Make out?" Venqas and Triana snapped in unison.

"I said 'or something.'"

"So, you think you're better than us because you're stronger?" Triana accused.

"No, I'm just saying-"

"Hey, we don't need your help!" Triana snapped, "Ven and I can think up a legitimately better battle plan than you stupid animals!"

"We can?"

"Aren't you technically a 'stupid animal' too?" Koal asked. The two humans stormed off leaving the 'stupid animals' confused. "There are humans in your world right?" Koal asked Turbo,

"Unfortunately." Turbo nodded.

"Are they all this stupidly petty?"

"Basically yes."

**Chapter 12: Separate Assaults**

All was quiet in Castle Hyrule. The dark beasts Ganondorf had replaced the Hyrule Soldiers with made their rounds around the city's perimeter. These creatures were dressed as soldiers, with armor and and lances. All of a sudden, one heard a rustling coming from a nearby bush and left its post to investigate. Upon inspecting the bush, a sword was jabbed through its head by Triana. The monster fell down, dead. Another monster came upon the scene, but was instantly hacked to bits by Venqas' keyblades. Upon being slain, the creatures vanished like a shadow in the light.

"What ARE these things?" Triana asked, having never seen creatures like these before.

"Heartless." Venqas stated. "Monsters that come out of the darkness in people's hearts. If someone yields to the darkness in their heart, they'll turn into a Heartless. And if they attack you, they can steal your heart, turning you into a Heartless as well. The Herald told me that if the darkness in one's heart is strong enough, they can control these freaks."

"That sounds like Ganondorf, alright." Triana sighed. "Let's keep going, there are more of these monsters patrolling the perimiter." All of a sudden, every Heartless around the castle came charging at the two,

"I should also mention that the Keyblade makes me basically a Heartless-magnet."

"You've got three of 'em, put 'em to use!" Triana charged at the Heartless, master sword ablaze.

Meanwhile, in the city...

The Hyrule soldiers were being rounded up by the Heartless, stripped of their weapons and put into what could only be described as concentration camps. A black shadow cast over the sky, like a great eagle. The soldiers looked up to see, much to their surprise, a dragon.

Koal looked down upon the 'concentration camps' and felt her rage rise like bile. She swooped down and landed in the middle, letting off a shrill roar to tell her foes what they were up against. The Heartless turned their full attention to Koal and rushed at her. The young dragoness grinned, opened her maw and unleashed a powerful blast of electricity that tore apart her foes at the seams. She then turned her attention to the soldiers.

"C'mon, I can't do this alone!" She called.

"The beast... It talks!" One of the soldiers exclaimed.

"Yeah, and she doesn't like being called a 'beast' either." Koal gave a deadpan snark. "Grab your weapons and help me fight!" All of a sudden, a swarm of shadows gathered on the ground and became three-dimensional. These were no doubt a different breed of Heartless, but they looked like pitch-black bugs with glowing yellow eyes. They were in greater numbers than the original, but they looked much more fragile.

All of a sudden, Turbo blasted onto the scene curled up into a ball, cutting through the first wave of Heartless like a buzzsaw.

"These things ain't so tough." Turbo grinned, landing on the ground and striking a heroic pose to show off how awesome he was.

"What manner of creatures are these?" One of the guards asked.

"Don't worry, we're the good guys." Koal chuckled.

"Let's kick some monster butt!" Turbo bellowed. All of a sudden, the Heartless began to converge on the same spot and merge together into a giant purple suit of armor that moved and acted with a will of its own.

"Oh crap..." Turbo groaned. The giant Heartless swung one of its gauntlets at the heroes, forcing Koal to take flight and Turbo to run circles around the menace. Turbo took out his hammer and began to swat at the metal monster, to no avail. "My Piko Piko hammer isn't affecting it!" He called to Koal.

"And my fire breath isn't having much luck either!" Koal called back, breathing a torrent of fire onto the monstrosity. The giant suit of armor grabbed Koal with its claw-like gauntlets and held her up to its face.

"Let me go!" Koal commanded, as if it would help. Turbo jumped at the monster and kicked it, which went about as well as one could expect.

"Ow, ow, ow..." Turbo groaned, hopping on one foot, holding the other. The metal monster kicked Turbo into a nearby wall.

"Let me go!" Koal yelled at the monster. She felt a power begin to rise. Her body began to burst into flames. "Let... me... GO!" A huge, crimson explosion of fire spread out around her, blazing like an erupting volcano. The sudden burst of power was too much for the giant Heartless to endure and it was disintegrated into a smoldering pile of ash within seconds. Koal floated to the ground, her power depleted to naught. As she began to black out, she saw more Heartless approach. Would that she could continue, but her power had abandoned her. She saw the Heartless seize a groggy Turbo. If she could get her hands on those monsters, she would have torn them to pieces, but she could not fight them anymore and passed out, the inky darkness of unconsciousness consuming her will to fight.


	5. Against the King of Evil

**Chapter 13: Try, Try Again  
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Koal awoke in a dungeon that looked just like one would expect a dungeon in a medieval world to look like. Her friends, Triana, Venqas and Turbo were with her in the same cell.

"Whuthappened?" Koal muttered, still groggy from expending all of her energy in her final attack.

"We got captured." Venqas sighed, crossing his arms and leaning against a wall. "Apparently rushing the castle by 'strategically' eliminating the guards was a better plan on paper. I can't _imagine_ why."

"Well, look where a guerrilla assault got _us_." Turbo admitted. "Guess we shoulda stuck together."

"Yeah, I did get a little petty back at the campsite." Triana apologized. "Now we're trapped without our weapons and Koal's wiped out. This was a disaster."

"I'll bet we mighta at least gotten farther, had we fought as a team." Koal wheezed.

"Exactly." The Herald said, appearing out of nowhere, startling the four neophyte warriors.

"Dude!" Turbo gasped. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to see that you had all learned your lesson." The Herald stated.

"Mind teleporting us out?" Koal requested, expecting the answer to be "no."

"I cannot, but I _can_ get you out."

"How?" Triana raised an eyebrow.

"Stand back..." The Herald pointed his hand at the door. All of a sudden, an energy blast flew from it and pulverized the door, shooting it into the wall. He turned to the heroes, "You're welcome."

"Well, WE coulda done that!" Venqas barked.

"Who wants to bet the door was never locked to begin with?" Koal's asked.

"Now that my business here is concluded-" The Herald pulled his sleeve over his hand, preparing to leave.

"Look, you can hold your own in a fight, you're breaking the rules anyway, we need your assistance... HELP US!" Everyone present snapped at the Herald.

"Listen, I would like to help, but I cannot violate the rules more than I already have." The Herald stated. "But rest assured, you have my full support." He vanished as if like a ghost, leaving all present very irritated.

"Are we sure he's one of the good guys?" Ven asked.

"Forget him, let's go!" Triana called.

"What about Koal?" Turbo asked. "She's pooped from using all her energy up! We can't just leave her, and she won't survive if we take her with us!"

"Turbo's right." Venqas agreed. "Koal's too tired to fight, but we can't leave her behind."

"Who're you calling 'too tired?'" Koal growled, standing up, which she was obviously ill-equipped to do. "I can take care of myself." She began to wobble on her forelegs like a baby learning to crawl. Triana couldn't help but remember Koal helping her at the campsite, where her own legs had been more wobbly than a baby's. "But incidentally, if you happen to have any red gems lying around..."

"I got something." Triana pulled a red crystal-like object out of her pocket and gave it to Koal. "It's a rupee. I'm not sure if it will help, but it's a red gem..." Koal held it up to the sunlight and a red glow bathed her. She felt her strength restore itself, like a dim fire with a fresh log thrown onto it. Koal spread out her wings, and opened her maw, allowing a small could of fire to come forth, as if to say "I'm back in the game!" She then noticed that the rupee had vanished, just like the gems back on her home world did when used to heal.

"Oh, sorry about the gem..." Koal sighed.

"It's okay." Triana smiled. "You needed it more than me."

"That was very big of you." Venqas said to Triana.

"Like you'd know altruism, Mr. Deserter." Turbo remarked.

"Didn't you run off too?" Venqas asked, pointing out Turbo's hypocrisy.

"I was jog-er, _reconning_!"

Venqas was dumbfounded and said the only two words on his mind, "Recon-ning? Really?"

"Hey, if you two are done here..." Triana called, from the doorway of the cell.

"Yeah, we've got a kingdom to save!" Koal grinned.

**Chapter 14: Against The King Of Evi**l

The four heroes crept through the halls of the palace after escaping the dungeon.

"What are we doing now?" Turbo inquired.

"We need to get our weapons back." Triana whispered. "Venqas and I aren't as helpful without our weapons. I know some magic, but none that would aid us."

"You see what I meant about Turbo and I fighting Ganondorf?" Koal asked.

"I still maintain that he must die by my hand, as only one with the Master Sword can slay him." Triana stated. "Being the daughter of the chosen one, Link, I'm the only one who can use it. But I do understand your point, and doing this as a team would likely be the best option."

"All we need are our weapons and we're-" Venqas paused, noticing Turbo holding the Keyblades and Triana's Master Sword. "How'd you-"

"Super speed." Turbo bragged. He handed Triana's master sword back to her. He noticed that Venqas' Keyblades were tied together by a chain of darkness. He tore it off and the Keyblades disappeared and reappeared, two in Venqas' hands and one floating behind his back."How'd you do that?"

"I... I don't think that was me." Venqas had so many questions about his new armaments, but none that could be answered by anyone present. He decided to hold off it until the world was saved. "C'mon, we got an evil warlock to fight!"

Ganondorf sat upon his throne -which he had appropriated from Link, the true King of Hyrule. He heard a loud thumping noise with pained grunts coming from outside his throne room. The doors suddenly leaped off of their hinges and landed a few feet before the evil warlock.

"What is the meaning of this?" He demanded. Triana entered the room, Master Sword drawn and ready for slaying. "Ah, Link's daughter..." He grinned. "You've come back to defeat me and avenge your parents." He stood up and grabbed a glowing white sword from the side. "Foolish girl, you dare to challenge me? Alone no less?"

"I'm not alone..." Triana grinned. All of a sudden, Turbo, Venqas and Koal entered the room and lined up on either side of Triana. "I brought some friends. I hope that's okay."

"Humph, you may bring an army, but it will not change the outcome!" Ganondorf boasted.

Turbo summoned his hammer and boasted back, "Hey, Cannon-Dork! When we're done with you, do us a favor and tell the devil he's next!"

"If you are going to bring friends, I hope you don't mind my doing the same." Ganon snapped his fingers and the enslaved werewolf versions Link and Zelda appeared out of thin air.

"...Uh..." Triana began to quiver and shake at the sight of her parents. Their eyes were glowing red, they were not in control of themselves and would murder her without a second thought if Ganondorf so desired.

"So?" Turbo scoffed, "We'll waste them and-"

"Turbo, they're... my parents..." Triana trembled.

"Not only that, but they're two of the finest warriors in Hyrule, and defeating you will be child's play..." Ganon boasted. He pointed his finger at the heroes and roared to his slaves, "Destroy them!"

"So now what? We're gonna have to fight your parents without hurting them?" Venqas asked.

"Looks like..." Triana groaned.

"I can be of assistance..." The Herald appeared out of nowhere, as per his style.

"How, by annoying them into submission?" Koal was the least thrilled to see this snake in the grass. The Herald pulled two broad swords out from under his cloak. He charged at Link, kicked him over, while using the kick to jump off him and launch into Zelda, knocking her over as well.

"I have these two! Go after Ganondorf!" The Herald called.

"_Finally_ he's useful!" Koal sighed.

"You will pay, monster!" Triana roared at Ganondorf, whilst charging at him with her sword in hand.

"Foolish girl, you think you can stop me?" The king of evil scoffed. All of a sudden, Turbo slammed him in the back with his hammer.

"It's called a diversion, genius!" Turbo chuckled. Ganon grabbed the hammer by its rod and used it to hurl Turbo into Triana. Koal blew a blazing fireball from her mouth at her green-skinned foe. The attack connected, but it hardly fazed him.

"Fools, NONE of you are a match for me!" Ganon boasted. All of a sudden, one of Ven's Keyblades smacked him in the face. Ganon was rather annoyed, to put it mildly.

"I got two more right here!" Ven called, holding his two other Keyblades. Ganon drove his fist into the ground, causing a pillar of dark energy to charge at Venqas. Koal swooped in and pulled him out of the way. "Thanks, I owe you one." Venqas remarked.

"Maybe you could go on a diet?" Koal grunted. "I'm not good at carrying passengers!" She dropped Ven on a nearby bookcase, and landed, huffing and puffing in exhaustion.

"Are you okay?" Ven asked.

"Not really..." Koal wheezed. "Just give me a sec to catch my breath..."

"She was more tired than she let on..." Venqas was confused. "If she wasn't in a condition to fight, why'd she act like she was?"

Meanwhile, Turbo dashed circles around Ganondorf to confuse and annoy him.

"Gotta keep movin'..." He thought. "Triana's the only one who can finish Ganon, so she can't afford to get hurt in this fight. Ven's not strong enough to handle him and Koal's still too wiped out... Guess I gotta do this myself." He jumped in the air and kicked Ganon in the chin, his foot moving faster than a speeding car.

"Annoying pest..." Ganon grabbed Turbo's leg and hoisted him up. "You seem rather fond of your legs...Tell me, how would you like it if they were snapped like twigs?" Suddenly, Triana slashed at Ganon's stomach with her sword, causing him to release Turbo.

"Damn! This isn't working right!" Triana thought as she struck him again like a lumberjack chopping a tree. "I'm supposed to win this fight personally, but that's impossible without my friends! Unfortunately, Venqas is too unskilled and inexperienced to be of any use, Turbo's attacks aren't harming him enough to wear him down..." She took another mighty slash at the king of evil. "If Koal were at full strength we might have a chance, but she's not. To think I used to wish for adventure to come take me away... I had no idea it would be this difficult." She took yet another slash. "Something is wrong here... The stories say that my father defeated Ganondorf with little trouble. But now, he won't stay down!" Ganon recoiled up against the wall.

"You have wounded me..." Ganon admitted. "But now you face my TRUE POWER!" He began to glow a blinding white and the throne room began to crumble. When the glow had ceased, the throne room was but a pile of rubble. And what of Ganondorf? He had turned into a giant, hideous, green boar-like monster that towered over the heroes with a fiery red mane flowing down his back.

"We have to fight _that_?..." Venqas groaned, knowing he and his teammates were very much screwed.


	6. Heart of all Worlds

**Chapter 15: Dark Beast Ganondorf**

The Monster Boar Version of Ganon let out a roar, glowing with dark energy. This new form suited him well, as now he was ugly on the outside to match the inside. He towered over the heroes, quashing what little embers of hope still burned inside them.

"What the heck..." Turbo looked on in awe, never having expected to fight something like THIS. The monster's eyes gleamed and he charged at Turbo, attempting to crush the young hedgehog, but Turbo's reflexes lived up to his name and he sprang to the side. Ganon turned his attention to Triana and charged forward at her, but her allies were one step ahead -Venqas leaped forward and struck Ganon in the face with his Keyblades and Turbo grabbed Triana and carried her to the sidelines with Koal.

"That was close..." Triana shuttered. "That monster must be stopped!"

"How?" Turbo exclaimed. "Our attacks barely hurt him in his human form-" Venqas flew past Turbo as if shot out of a cannon into a chunk of still-standing wall, "How do we stop him like _this_?"

"My fury power's outta the question..." Koal panted, still struggling to regain her strength. Ganon lunged forward, attempting to trample the heroes, but they swiftly dodged to either side of him and he ran a full quarter-mile before turning around.

"Any ideas?" Venqas asked, trembling in at the mere sight of the beast. He looked up and noticed that the orange glow of the evening sun had fled and the silver glow of the late-evening moon had come to fill in for it.

"Oh no..." Triana groaned upon seeing the moon. She doubled over, fell to the ground and became cloaked in her silver fur coat, accompanied by her long, wet nose and sleek, smooth tail. Of all the times for this to happen, now was probably the worst, but knowing her kind of luck, it could only make sense. "Well this is just peachy, how do I fight him now?" Ganon stampeded closer and closer. Turbo brandished his hammer and Venqas readied his keyblades. The two swung at Ganon right as he got close, causing him to stumble backwards, momentarily dazed.

"That's it!" Koal figured out a weakness in their mighty foe. "When he's charging he can't stop easily!"

"So we BAIT him into charging and then attack him full-force point-blank! He won't be able to stop in time or defend himself!" Ven caught on rather quickly for someone who was still shaky on the concept of being part of a team.

"Let's do this!" Turbo grinned, having a special plan for the "bating" part. Ganon began to shake off his dizziness and refocused himself on the matter at hand.

"Hey, Ganon!" Turbo jeered, with his usual amount of respect for anyone in general absent, "You're so ugly that you could throw a boomerang and it would never come back!" Ganon raised an eyebrow, unsure of why the young warrior would bother making a derogatory remark when his life was in such mortal danger.

"What are you doing?" Koal asked. She was all for mouthing off to people, but to someone who had the full intention of killing them? Was this a plan, or him resigning to his fate?

"Getting him mad." This was the fight Turbo was born for, one in which mouthing off to someone would work in his favor. "(follow my lead)..." He turned to a very confused Ganon and let loose another schoolyard-level taunt, "You're so stupid that when you go to a mind-reader you get half-price!"

"Oh I get it..." Koal gave a malicious grin, enjoying this plan, if that was what you could call it. She let out a shout, "Ganon! You're so fat that before you took over this city, it was on a plateau!"

"Let me try! Let me try!" Venqas became eager to join in. "You're so ugly you could turn Medusa to stone!"

"Allow me..." Triana grinned. "You're so stupid and ugly that you fell out of the ugly tree, hit your head on every branch on the way down, then climbed back up and did it again!"

Ganon was very much pissed. How dare these... these... _children_ insult him? He was overtaken by hatred and charged at them in a blind rage, thinking of nothing but crushing them into oblivion. Turbo curled up into a ball and spun round and round like a wheel. Ganon came closer and closer. Turbo blasted forward and slammed him in the face. He rebounded off and landed on his feet. Ganon sprawled out on the ground, but threatened to get up at any moment. Venqas charged forward and slashed Ganon with his Keybaldes three times. Koal then called upon whatever power she had left and exhaled a giant fireball at her foe, setting him on fire. Triana grabbed the hilt of her sword in her lupine mouth. She charged at Ganon, but she feared that she would not make it to him before he got up. Suddenly, she lifted off the ground, compliments of Turbo. He sped forward and hurled Triana into the air, landing her in Koal's grasp. Koal soared to Ganon and dropped Triana to Venqas, who held his three Keyblades so that they would form a platform for Triana to jump on, and jump on it she did. Triana jumped off the platform with all her might and drove the Master Sword into Ganon's forehead. Time stood still for a moment. Before the dark beast could react, his life had been ended, as would have anyone that of anyone else who had taken a sword to the face. The monster collapsed like a mighty oak, at long last, vanquished once again by the Master Sword. Triana held her head high and let out a triumphant howl that echoed all throughout the kingdom.

**Chapter 16: The Heart Of All Worlds**

"Yeah!" Koal cheered. "We did it!" Turbo and Venqas gave each other a high-five.

The Werewolf Link began to cringe in pain, causing the Werewolf Zelda to rush to his side before succumbing to the same pain. Ganon's curse had been broken, and they were freed. As they regained their senses, they looked upon their altered forms, thinking they would change back any moment now. And yet, they did not.

"What?" The Herald gasped. "But Ganondorf was killed! They're not mind-controlled anymore, but their forms have not shifted back to normal!"

"What happened?" Triana, still in wolf form called, dashing up to the Herald and her parents. She looked at them, their eyes were once again as she remembered them, but their bodies were still as they were when Ganondorf transformed them that fateful night. "But- but- Why are you still werewolves?"

"Whatever Ganondorf did to us, it's not going away that easily." Link sighed. "Our wills are free, but our forms remain trapped."

"Ooohhh..." Triana groaned. "We're stuck like this forever?"

"Only at night, now that Ganon's dead." The Herald stated.

"Life can take unexpected twists, ones that we would rather it not..." Zelda knelt down to pat her daughter on the head. "But we're glad that you're alright, honey."

"And impressed." Link expressed, looking upon Ganondorf's corpse. "_You _defeated _Ganondorf_?"

"Well, not just me..." Triana grinned. Turbo, Venquas and Koal approached the scene. "I had some help from a few friends..."

"We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!" Turbo cackled, hoping to savor every moment of this victory.

"What're we gonna do with the body?" Venqas asked.

"My father once said that the corpses of those bathed in evil decompose at an alarming rate." Koal smirked. "So, don't worry about it." She noticed that Triana and her parents were still sealed in their wolf forms, despite her assumption that they would revert upon the warlock's demise, "Wait, now that Ganon's dead, shouldn't you all-"

"Apparently not!" Link, Zelda and Triana interrupted Koal, quite irritable, considering that they were now forced to turn into wolves at night.

"Okay..."

"You have all done a great heroism tonight." The Herald proclaimed, causing the mood of the moment to whiplash like a bungee cord. "You have saved Hyrule from one of the most evil and persistent villains in all recorded history."

"Cool, so when do we save Turbo, Venqas and Koal's homeworlds?" Triana inquired, having never gotten around to finding out why her homeworld was up first.

"Um..." Turbo's smug, arrogant face twisted into a mask of sorrow and depression that his allies had yet to see him wear. "My world... yeah... there's not much left to save..."

"Same here..." Koal sighed, her face donning the same mask of sadness.

"I can beat that, I got NOTHING left to save." Venqas frowned, the mask of sorrow having gone on sale just this moment. "Literally, NOTHING. World pulled apart at the seams; portals of darkness swallowed everyone; all culminating in a spectacle that will haunt my nightmares."

"Wh-what?" Triana gasped, horrified at the mental images she now endured of a world and its inhabitants being lost to the darkness. "Bu-but HOW? How can that happen?"

"Their worlds were devoured by the Heartless." The Herald stated with a grim tone. "You see, there is a keyhole that leads to the heart of every world. If the Heartless can find it, they can enter the keyhole, find the heart if the world and consume it, thus destroying the world and everyone in it."

"Oh my god!" Link gasped in horror. Zelda cuddled up close to her husband, fearful of the Herald's story.

"Long ago, the Heartless were devouring worlds one-by-one, left and right." The Herald elaborated. "But Venqas' father stopped them. He locked the remaining keyholes and eventually restored the lost worlds to life."

"Locked the keyholes?" Turbo was puzzled, as if he wasn't already.

"He used his Keyblade to seal them off from any further attempts by the Heartless." The Herald explained.

"Wait, but my island was swallowed up and my father LIVED THERE!" Ven interjected. "How did that happen, if in all likelihood the Keyhole of my world was locked?"

"Somehow, the keyholes have become unlocked in certain locales." The Herald continued. "And it was no accident. Someone KNEW Venqas' father lived on Destiny Islands and deliberately unlocked the keyhole, knowing that it could then be invaded, overrun and destroyed."

"But wait... why didn't the Heartless devour this world?" Triana asked, trying to make sense of the Herald's story, which was about as easy as trying to solve a puzzle while blindfolded.

"The Heartless did not attempt to search for the keyhole because Ganondorf was controlling them, and either he knew nothing of the keyholes or he simply wished to _rule_ Hyrule -which would not involve it being destroyed."

"Hold on, back up." Koal was confused and more than a little angry. "You're telling us some son-of-a-bastard just decided to unlock the keyholes to our worlds and send the Heartless to eat them?"

"Actually, this is where it becomes complicated."

"Like it wasn't already?" All present said in unison.

"Heartless are only indigenous to the worlds near Venqas' homeworld. They never came to this world or your world because they were never connected to the worlds near his-"

"Connected?" Turbo asked, interrupting like a teenager in a history class.

"Look, I'm trying to stay on task... and the 'connected' part isn't important." The Herald shot Turbo a nasty look that could turn one to stone if he wasn't careful. "At least not at this second... Anyway, the Heartless had never attempted to go after these unlocked worlds because they did not have access to them because they were too far away and had no way to access them. But now that they are available, the Heartless can invade any world they see fit and devour it."

"Wait, so you're telling us that the worlds have become connected somehow?" Triana inquired, now trying to solve a puzzle while blindfolded without using her hands. "And now they're all in danger of being devoured? Where do we fit in to all of this, as if I couldn't guess..."

"You are to all go to different worlds and lock the keyholes with Venqas' keyblades." The Herald directed. "You four are the universe's last hope against the heavy weight of the darkness."

"Aside from the fact that that's not something you should ask of a child, wouldn't whoever's behind this just unlock the keyholes again?" Zelda interjected, detesting the very thought of poor Triana putting her life on the line after all this.

"If Venqas had just one keyblade, maybe. But he has three, which can strengthen the lock three-fold."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Venqas interrupted. "I can't- I- I didn't ask for any of this!"

"The keyblades choose their masters." The Herald stated. "Sora and Kairi gave up their keyblades when their lives were forfeit, and they knew that you would succeed them one day as a keyblade master." He scowled, "In other words: Tough f—king luck."

"N-no way!" Ven had gone along with this so far, but now that he knew what he was up against? Forget it! "I'm not ready for this! I shouldn't HAVE to be ready for this!"

"Suit yourself, but you DO remember that the Keyblades attract Heartless to you, right?"

"Stop trying to scare him!" Triana barked. "He didn't want any of this to happen and he's still coping with the idea of doing this- this-"

"I'm not giving you orders..." The Herald realized that instilling fear was not a good way to build confidence. "But the worlds need saving, and you're the only ones who can do it."

"Sorry, pal, find yourself some other chumps!" Link barked. "My daughter is not going to put her life in danger for this- this-"

"Daddy!" Triana snapped, tired of him not letting her have any adventure in her life, all because of something as trivial as her safety, "I'm not a little girl anymore. I can take care of myself. And damn it all to hell, I'm going to tear those rotten Heartless limb-from-limb for what they've done!"

"Yeah me too!" Turbo agreed. "Those things ate my world, so I'm gonna pound them like nails!"

"Count me in!" Koal added. "My parents would've done the same thing! Those monsters will pay for destroying our lives!" All eyes turned to Venqas, the only member of the group who had not agreed to join in on this crusade.

"Okay, look..." The Keyblade-wielding, spiky-haired teenager sighed. "This is waaayyy too big for me. Until a week ago, I thought that the hardest thing in my life was gonna be high school, and now I gotta fight world-eating demons?" He saw the looks on his colleagues' faces, "But the truth is... I've really come to like you all. And I know that my keyblades are important, and I'm the only ones who can use 'em..." There was a dead silence. "I may regret it for the rest of my short, short life, but I'm in."

"That's the spirit!" Triana howled. "Well, kinda..." Zelda moved a rock, revealing a stained glass window with a golden triangle constructed of three smaller triangles. By some miracle, it had not a scratch on it, and looked positively radiant in the low light of the early morning.

"At least _this_ wasn't broken..." Zelda sighed.

The tips of Venqas' keyblades flashed and a glowing black keyhole appeared on the triangle. The keyblades floated over to the keyhole and fired a piercing white beam of light at it. There was a sound that resembled a door locking. The keyhole disappeared and Venqas' keyblades came back to him.

"So that's how you lock a keyhole." Ven mused, still curious about the mysterious Keyblades. "That wasn't so hard..."

"So it's settled, we're gonna save the worlds!" Turbo proclaimed, holding his hammer up high in a heroic fashion, attracting silent stares from his colleagues. The sun began to rise, bathing Link, Zelda and Triana in a golden glow of warmth that pieced through the darkness that held them. The fur that dominated their forms receded and their bodies were once again as they remembered them. Triana stood upright, which displeased her because she had actually gotten USED to standing on all fours,

"Back to normal... for now..." She sighed, annoyed by how jarring the change was. It seemed that once she got the hang of a certain form, she was flung into a different one, as if it were some sadistic higher being's way of tormenting her. Her stomach growled like a hungry beast. And speaking of torment, she hadn't eaten in days!

"Tee-hee, let's get some food for our heroes." Zelda giggled, as the sun peeked through the ruins of the throne room. This world may have been saved, but more still called. For the four young heroes, it was only the beginning.

**Chapter 17: Conference of Evil**

In a darkly-lit room, multiple dark figures surrounded a table. One spoke up, this figure having the form of a turtle with a hint of dragon lineage,

"I can't believe those little punks took down Ganondorf!" He scowled in a gravelly, monstrous voice.

"Such was the power of the Master Sword, the girl's power was not her own." A crystalline figure with quills not unlike Turbo's stated in a vaguely English accent. "Her lack of experience and weak abilities mark her an irritation at best. She is of minimal threat to us."

"Take it from me, any threat, no matter how minimal, is still a cause for concern." A man with blue spiky hair mentioned. "The boy is a bigger problem, he found one of the keyholes."

"You worry too much." A figure in a black coat and cowl stated. "It will take him ages to find the rest."

"The dragoness is still a concern." A figure with the form of a dragon stated in a dark, feminine voice. "Great power sleeps within her. Power enough to defeat even myself if she were to harness it."

"We could turn her into a Heartless." A robotic figure suggested. "That would settle things quick enough."

"Indeed, and it would grant us a Nobody to add to our ranks as well." The black coat figure agreed.

"And what of the hedgehog?" The figure with the quills asked. "His father was able to destroy me in the past. Doubtless he could do the same if he were to uncover his true potential."

"His power has yet to reach a point where it could realistically harm us." The black coat figure asserted. "These four could be a problem, but they could also be quite useful to us... But at any rate, return to your assigned worlds. If you see them, kill on sight."

"Lord Kixur, if I might make a suggestion..." The robotic figure interjected.

"Make it quick, Sigma." The hooded man stated.

"Perhaps we could find more recruits for our cause." The robot suggested. "As a matter of fact, there's a silver-haired fellow right down the road from me who's plotting world domination. When he's not too busy with his fangirls, I could induct him into our ignoble cause."

"Fine, if it will supplement our plans, I have no objections." The hooded man said. "I have an 'old friend' to attend to. You are dismissed." The figures all left and the hooded man entered a secret chamber, where Sora and Kairi -Venqas' parents- were being held in an electric torture chamber of some sort. The figure slowly approached them, as Sora's eyes pried themselves open. He removed his hood.

"Sora, old friend, we meet again..."

"You!"


	7. Party Time!

**Act 2: Learning Curve**

**Chapter 18: Triana V.S. Dignity**

"Triana, hurry up!" Link impatiently called from the stairwell that lead to Triana's room.

"In a moment, father!" Triana called back.

"The celebration begins in five minutes!" Link was frustrated with his daughter -she had saved Hyrule just the other day, yet she took so long to get ready for a simple celebration. "You need to be ready, young lady!"

"I'm working on it!" Triana yelled from her bedroom. Triana was adorned in a regal gown, much unlike her tunic and skirt, which actually allowed movement beyond baby steps. Her reliable leather boots had been replaced with high-heel slippers. She wore a tiara and long, starch-white gloves to go with it in opposition to her green elf-like cap and sturdy leather gloves. She nervously combed her long, silky hair with a brown wooden comb while looking in a mirror upon a vanity made of sturdy oak wood. In her room with her was her snarky yet reliable friend, Koal the dragon. The young dragoness sat upon Triana's freshly-made bed much like a cat, only 100 times more awesome.

"So, explain to me again why you're getting into that ridiculous outfit?" Koal inquired, unfamiliar with the concept of clothing in general, being from a world full of dragons where only a few tribes of creatures wore any clothing at all. But even then, the clothing was either for warmth or protection -why Triana was getting into a dress that not only provided neither and hindered her movements was beyond her.

"My father is holding a celebration in honor of us saving Hyrule... Well, it's mostly for me, but I do give you credit, along with Ven and Turbo."

"And you're getting into such a cumbersome and ludicrous outfit because?..."

"Well... people do it to look nice for special occasions." Triana explained, trying to keep in mind that Koal had never worn any clothing, much less anything that wouldn't be practical in combat.

"There's nothing 'nice' about not being able to walk ten feet without tripping on your own clothes." Koal smirked, never giving up a chance to get in a smarmy comment.

"Well, us humans are better coordinated than you four-legged dragons." Triana combed her autumn-gold hair, but with little success, as like her, it refused to stay down. "Grr... can't get it to stay down!"

"Let me help." Koal offered. Her eyes glowed a storming yellow and she began to inhale. The static electricity in Triana's hair disappeared like magic, allowing it to be tamed at long last.

"Thanks." Triana finally got her hair the way she wanted it -or rather, the way she _needed it_. "How'd you do that?"

"Elemental powers work both ways." Koal explained. "I can inhale something that I can exhale. It's nothing special, but it has its uses."

"Young lady, you've got thirty seconds!" Triana's father called, having lost his patience many years ago, even before Triana was born. Specifically, he'd lost it in a dungeon known as the Arbiter's Grounds, but that was another story.

"All right, I'm coming!" Triana barked. She headed toward the door, desperately trying not to trip on her high-heels.

"Maybe I could fly you down the stairs." Koal offered, feeling like she had to remind Triana how to walk every five minutes.

"Why?"

"I'm uncomfortable seeing you WALK in that outfit, much less climb down stairs."

"I know how to walk without falling all over myself-" Triana hated being patronized more than anything. While in truth, she never COULD walk in high-heels, she refused to let anyone know that. But then again, fate wasn't particularly fond of her. She took one wrong step, tripped on her dress and stumbled over, falling onto her bed and landing next to Koal, who wore a mischievous, smug grin upon her obsidian face.

"My offer still stands... unlike you." She chuckled, taking pride in this petty victory.

**Chapter 19: Banquet**

It was early morning in the city of Hyrule. In the ballroom of the castle, a huge celebration in honor Triana and her friends saving all of Hyrule was in progress. Of course, Triana being royalty, the celebration was in _her_ honor, but Triana had vowed that she would not hog all the credit.

King Link and Queen Zelda sat at an elevated table with their daughter, Princess Triana by their side. All the guests were seated at smaller tables, but they were so numerous that one could be excused for thinking all in the providence had been invited. Triana's eyes blazed around the room, looking for her friends. She spotted them at a table in the corner, looking her way. She glanced over to Venqas, who smiled to her, making her smile back, as if it were a reflex.

"Attention!" The King bellowed, clanging a spoon against his goblet to garner the attention of the room. Triana snapped out of staring at Venqas, this being the second time she had found herself doing so. "I'd like to thank you all for coming, and I would like to introduce you to Hyrule's newest savior -My daughter, Princess Triana!" Triana stood up and took a bow. There was much applause.

"I just want to say, I could not have done it alone!" Triana called . "I had the assistance of three great friends. Please come up here, Venqas, Koal and Turbo the Hedgehog!" There was even more applause. Koal dashed up with Turbo the Hedgehog in tow. Venqas followed behind slowly, due to his human walking speed. They all lined up in front of Triana and faced the crowd. There was still more applause.

"Thanks to Venqas' skill, Koal's insight and Turbo's resilience, peace has been restored!" Triana called. "And guess what? We're not just going to save _this_ world, we're going to-"

"No." The enigmatic cloaked man known as Herald whispered from behind her, appearing out of nowhere because that was what he was best at. "Do not mention the existence of other worlds. You must keep them a secret."

"(got it)" Triana whispered back. She turned back to the audience and improvised a finish to her previous statement, "...Uh, we're gonna make sure this world will NEVER be in peril AGAIN!" The applause level was over nine-thousand!

The banquet had commenced, and Triana sat at a table with her friends, talking about their recent exploits as they chowed down on plentiful food fit for royalty, and the friends of royalty.

"So, that was a pretty bang-up job we did killing Ganon, locking the keyhole, ya know..." Venqas took a bite of roast beef. "Teamwork and all that crud. All things considered, it worked out pretty well."

"I'd say we make a good team." Triana nodded her head. "We've got skill, style, power... But one thing's been bugging me... who's gonna be in charge of our group?"

"No idea." Koal said, gnawing the meat off a turkey leg. "Probably best that we figure that out later."

"I like this here drink." Turbo held up a draught of a yellow fizzy beverage. "It tastes like apple cider mixed with honey."

"That's mead you idiot, it's alcoholic." Venqas glared.

"No, no, that's a non-alcoholic variation on the drink that contains bee larva." Triana giggled. "And trust me, we don't need Turbo of all people getting drunk."

"Bee larva?" Venqas asked, squeamishly.

"I'm still stuck on the notion of Turbo getting drunk." Koal glanced to Turbo with a grin upon her face. "He's bad enough sober."

"I'd make a joke about 'getting hammered,' but that'd be too obvious." Turbo chuckled in regards to his Piko Piko hammer.

"I trust you all are enjoying the party?" The Herald approached the heroes, carrying a plate piled high with ham, turkey, cheese, grapes, and fish.

"You bet!" Turbo held up a chicken drumstick. "The chicken here's so rich and dense I could use it as a weapon!" He took a bite out of it.

"I'm glad you appreciate it, as slaughterhouses are one of the more dangerous places in our lands." Triana grinned. "We lose more butchers to chickens than soldiers to war each year."

"You made that up." Ven jokingly accused.

"I wish I had..."

"So what's up?" Koal asked the Herald. "Why are you here?"

"There was free food, and I have not eaten for days." The Herald laughed, taking a bite out of a ham leg.

"So, that rules out you being a robot, huh?" Turbo chuckled.

"Come again?" The Herald raised an eyebrow, but no one could tell, as his face was not visible under his hood.

"See, we all got a bet goin' on." Turbo explained. "I say you're a robot or cyborg, Koal says you're one of our parents in disguise, Venqas says you're an alien and Triana says you're a demon who serves the side of good. Who wins?"

"I will not answer that question." Herald beamed.

"Well, I guess I'll just go back to my bet with Ven -Whoever eats more food wins and the loser has to polish the winner's weapons. So if I lose, I polish his Keybaldes. If I WIN, he polishes my Piko Piko hammer."

"By the way, where do you _keep_ your hammer?" Koal asked, wondering how Turbo could keep such a large weapon concealed when he didn't even have a bag, much less one big enough to hold his hammer.

"Subspace, duh! Or hammer-space, whatever floats your boat."

"You can access subspace to store items?" Triana inquired. "That could be useful."

"Actually, it's only my hammer. My mother could access hammer-space, and somehow that was passed down to me, so she trained me how to clobber enemies into pancakes with the hammer."

"But, why would you need a weapon like that if you can run from anything you can't beat and you can already curl up into a buzzsaw to attack?" Koal had noticed that Turbo's hammer, while useful in his hands, was next to useless on its own.

"Trust me, it comes in handy." Turbo asserted.

"But why not use something more aerodynamic, like a baseball bat?" Venqas suggested.

"Because then the Scout could sue him for plagiarism." The Herald joked.

"Who's the Scout?" Koal asked.

"No one important at this moment. You may meet him eventually, though. Speaking of which..." The Herald prepared to change the subject, "I trust you are all ready to embark on our journey? We are leaving today."

"Heck yeah, I'm ready!" Turbo's eyes sparked with lust for adventure.

"Me too." Koal nodded, ready to go kick some ass.

"Um, I don't know..." Triana rubbed the back of her head. "My parents still don't like the idea of me risking my life against such impossible odds."

"I'm still working out the 'risking my life' thing." Venqas was the only member of the group who was unwilling to answer the call of adventure. "I'm not sure I'm ready yet. I mean, my father was a self-taught master swordsman, but I've never even swung a sword before this week."

"I could teach you." Triana offered, knowing full well that Venqas was a novice swordsman and wished to rectify that.

"I'm pretty sure a Keyblade works much differently than a normal sword. Besides, it's not like I'm looking to be in a fight anyway." Venqas refused to resign to his duty. Turbo bonked him on the head with his hammer.

"Stop being so damn negative!" He snapped, tired of this downer mucking up his fun.

"And stop making up excuses!" Koal was even more fed up with Venqas. "It's like you're making a list of reasons not to come with us!"

"I shouldn't have to risk my life for something like this! I'm just a kid!"

"Well, so am I, but you don't hear ME complaining. Are all humans this selfish and cowardly, or are you just that way personally?" Koal barked, having received a very negative image of humans from Triana's clumsiness and stubbornness and Venqas' cowardice and apathy "We need you and your keyblades to seal off worlds! Like it or not, you're the only one who can!"

"Isn't there someone else? Anyone else?" Venqas was constantly searching for ways out, which did little more than annoy his allies.

"I will look into that matter." The Herald knew that there were other Keyblade wielders, but none with Sora's blood running through their veins. "I realize that this is a lot of pressure to put on a group of children, so those of you who want to come, meet me at the drawbridge by sunset. Those of you who do not... well, you can stay here, but you WILL be stranded on this world with no way to leave."


	8. The Final Fantasy Frontier

**Chapter 20: Embarkation**

The sun inched closer and closer to the horizon as the Herald waited patiently by the drawbridge for the heroes to arrive. Would they step up to the challenge, or would they back away? Turbo came speeding up, wearing an eager look upon his face. It was no surprise that he would come, being the most excited about the mission. Koal soared across the twilight orange-hued sky and landed near the Herald, not much of a surprise either, considering that she wanted revenge on the Heartless and refused to sit by while the universe came to its knees.

"Is this it?" Koal had been worried that the Herald giving the group the option to stay behind would backfire, "Are we the only ones?"

"Nope." Triana called, walking up to the group, donning her green tunic and cap, which were decidedly more comfortable than the dress. Her leather boots allowed her to walk more than five feet without falling all over herself and her gloves allowed her to use her fingers to their fullest extent. Her sword and scabbard rested upon her back, accompanied by a large metal shield. She also sported a leather purse that she wore around a finely woven strap. "I'm coming with you. As if I'd miss out on all the fun."

"So, here we have the tomboy princess joining the cloaked dude, black she-dragon and the handsome, stylish, young hedgehog to save the universe." Turbo remarked, never backing down from a chance to sharpen his wit.

"Long story short, my saving Hyrule has attracted some... uh... unwanted suitors... and uh, as princess, I should... um..." Triana stuttered, suddenly worried upon investigating who was present and who was not.

"What's wrong?" Koal knew that Triana had noticed the absence of Venqas, who she also knew Triana liked, or at the very least found atheistically pleasing.

"I was kind of hoping Venqas would be coming. "But I guess his refusal to risk his life for something he doesn't want any part of got the best of him."

Turbo closed his eyes and crossed his arms, "Ah, who needs him?"

"WE do!" The Herald snapped. "His Keyblades are the only things that can save the worlds!"

"Pfft, if those Keyblades are so darn 'special,' why'd they go to a coward like him?"

"He's got a point." Koal agreed. "You told us that Keyblades are supposed to go to people with strong hearts, but Venqas isn't very strong or brave."

"His parents gave them to him when they were about to be taken away by the forces of evil, which was right before I stepped in to rescue him." The Herald explained, "They knew their Keyblades would do more good in his hands than in theirs."

"But what if the Keyblades _didn't _have to go to _him_?" Koal still refused to believe Venqas had a strong enough heart to have ONE Keyblade, let alone three, "If they could pick from between him and anyone else on his island, would they have still gone to Venqas?"

"I guess you guys didn't notice I was right here." Venqas approached the group, wearing a disdainful look upon his face.

"So, you decided to show up." The Herald was relieved that he did not have to find a stand-in for Venqas after all.

"Can we go now?" Venqas impatiently requested.

"Finally decided to accept your duty?" Koal asked, refusing to believe that Venqas could have had such a sudden change of heart simply because he wanted to do the right thing.

"I don't feel like talking. Just because you are all content to throw your lives away doesn't mean that I-" There was a sudden flash of light. Venqas stopped for a moment to take a look at the new environment he and his friends had appeared in. They were in what appeared to be a spaceship of some sort. The floor was made of an orange and green metal, which none of the heroes recognized. To the front of the ship was a seat and a helm on a dashboard full of lights and buttons, some of which appeared to just be for decoration. Out of the front window, they saw the starry cosmos of the universe they had long thought to have been empty except for their respective worlds -three out of four of which had been devoured by the malevolent forces of darkness.

"I... um..." Venqas stuttered, unable to finish his sentence.

"You asked to depart immediately, and doing so without warning was the quickest way that came to mind." The Herald chuckled.

"Where ARE we?..." Koal was perplexed by the odd, unfamiliar machine she now stood in.

"This is the Gummi Ship..." The Herald stated. All four heroes went hysterical at the ridiculous name.

"Gummi Ship?" Turbo roared with laughter. "That sounds like a kind of candy!"

"More like an anime slash-fic!" Venqas wheezed, holding his sides as if they were about to split.

"Are you all quite done?" The Herald shot the four heroes a nasty look, which they could not see, due to his hood concealing his face in shadow.

"Hoo... yeah..." Turbo sighed, wiping a joy-summoned tear from his eye. "For now..."

"As I was saying... this vessel is capable of traveling to other worlds. It will be your main mode of transportation."

"Um, question?" Venqas called, raising his hand, "When you say '_your_ mode of transportation', does that mean WE'RE gonna be flying it?"

"Yes."

"But... NONE OF US KNOW HOW TO FLY A SPACESHIP!" Venqas snapped, speaking the mind if the entire team. The Herald paused for a moment and took a note pad out of his sleeve.

"Let's see... lecture about responsibility, lecture about the Heartless, teach them a lesson about teamwork..." He read off of what sounded like a to-do list. "...ask them if they know how to fly a spaceship... DAMN, I _knew _I forgot something!"

"So, now what do we do, Captain _Jerk?_" Turbo rudely inquired.

"Teach you, I guess." Herald sighed, frustrated.

"I'd better do it." Venqas volunteered. "Koal doesn't have opposable thumbs, Triana's from a world with no computers and Turbo's probably gonna crash us into a meteor or something by accident."

"Point taken..." The Herald said, noticing Turbo spinning his hammer around on his index finger. The hammer slipped off and bonked him in the head. Triana and Koal giggled, thus accomplishing Turbo's goal.

**Chapter 21: Giant-Ass-Satellite-Laser-Cannon**

The Gummi Ship soared through the cosmos at near-light speed... ah who am I kidding? It was all over the nonexistent road.

"Keep her steady..." The Herald instructed Venqas, who had taken the helm. The young key-bearer was nervous and could not fly in a straight line if his life depended on it.

"Rrrgh... How does anyone fly this damn thing?" Ven groaned, struggling with the controls.

"It's fairly easy once you get the hang of it."

"How long's it take to get the hang of it?"

"It varies."

"From between what-and-what?"

"If I tell you, you'll freak out and crash us into a star or something..." The Herald put his palm to his face in frustration. "...just stay focused..."

While the Herald began to lose his patience with Venqas, Turbo and the girls were talking near the back of the ship.

"I think something's wrong with the Herald." Triana observed the Herald's behavior, "He seems upset."

"Yesterday he was all pompous and witty, but today he's actually pretty irritable..." Koal agreed, "Almost like he's a different person."

"Yeah, it seems like he's actually trying to be serious..." Turbo added, rolling his eyes.

"Let's not bother them." Koal suggested. "The last thing we need is for Venqas to get more stressed and ram us into a star or something."

"Changing the subject, I wonder what world we're going to go to first?" Triana asked. "I'm actually excited, if you can believe it." Without warning, the ship violently shook, hurling the jarred heroes onto their backsides.

"What the hell?" Koal exclaimed.

"We've been hit!" The Herald yelled.

"By what? We're in space!"

"Um, it looks like... a giant-ass-satellite-laser-cannon!" Venqas called. Turbo dashed up to the cockpit to see a huge satellite-like machine with a ginormous cannon-like instrument pointed at them. The machine was almost big enough to be its own world and it struck fear into the hearts of those who dared to gaze upon it.

"Space Colony Ark?" Turbo exclaimed, surprised to see the old research facility that had once orbited around his homeworld now threatening to annihilate his friends and he.

"You know what that thing is?" Ven asked.

"It's a space station that was supposed to be like, a humongous research facility." Turbo explained. "Long story short, Government went crazy, killed Maria Robotnik, the granddaughter of the head scientist, the biggest project went crazy, tried to destroy world, ended up saving it instead, and some crap about aliens."

"That's not exactly 'short'." Koal interjected.

"Trust me, the long version is a lot more-"

"And _that big cannon is_?" Venqas pulled his nonhuman allies' attention back to the big obvious threat at hand.

"The Eclipse Cannon." Turbo's heart stopped upon saying the name. "Simply put, GET US THE HELL OUTTA HERE!" The Eclipse Cannon began to charge up for another laser blast. Venqas vigorously attempted to steer the ship out of the way, but it was too late -the cannon fired and struck the Gummi Ship, causing it to plummet downward to the world below. The heroes braced themselves as death began to open her arms to them, and her lethal embrace became all the more tempting as they fell faster and faster...

**Chapter 22: Spaceshipwrecked**

Triana felt her eyelids began to pry themselves open. Was she dead? Was this the afterlife? What of her friends? Had they survived? No way, NOTHING could survive something like that.

"Triana?" She heard Venqas' voice call. "Triana, where are you?" His voice was tense and worried. Her eyes blazed open. She was trapped under a mound of rubble that threatened to squeeze the life out of her. No, she could not go like this! She had to live!

With one swing of her Master Sword, she cut through the suffocating rubble and pulled herself out like a member of the living dead popping out of its grave. She saw Venqas searching through a different pile of rubble, desperately calling her name,

"Triana! Please... please be okay..."

"I'm right here!" Triana called, pulling herself up and approaching him.

"Y-you're okay!" He gasped, tears coming to his eyes as a smile crept its way onto his face. He then caught himself getting emotional, and tried to revert to his stoic exterior, "Um... uh... that was a close one..." His cheeks bore a bright scarlet hue, as masking his emotions was never easy to do. "I'm glad you're alright."

"Well, I'm glad you're okay too..." Triana's cheeks gained a similar red hue. "What about Koal and Turbo?"

"We're right here." Turbo called from the side. He was wrapping gauze around Koal's wing with a first-aid kit open near his feet.

"What IS this crap?" Koal asked, agitated by having something put onto her wing that would be so hindersome.

"It's called a bandage." Turbo was impatient, having just survived a crash and having to deal with a stubborn she-dragon was the last thing he wanted. "Your wing is injured, and this will protect it from getting hurt any more."

"This stupid thing feels too tight." Koal had always hated doctors, because all she needed to heal were some red gems, that -while common in her world- were scarce in other worlds.

"That's the point." Turbo glared.

"Are you hurt?" Venqas asked Triana. "We got a first-aid kit over there."

"No, in my land we have a saying: 'If it didn't come off, it'll heal."

"Um... okay..." Venqas still had to remind himself that Triana was from a much less-advanced world than he.

"Anyone seen the Herald?" Turbo asked. "I can't find him anywhere."

"I bet he's gonna let us think he's dead and not come back for a while with a paper-thin explanation as to why." Koal expressed her less-than-fondness of the cloaked man.

"I heard that!" A static voice whirred. A hologram of the Herald appeared center of the heroes.

"Oh, great. Where'd you run off to now?" Turbo asked, being no more fond of this enigmatic, unhelpful ally than the rest of his team.

"I got injured and had to return to my master's headquarters for- uh... to _heal_..." The Herald had a dubious undertone of hesitation in his voice.

"Who IS your master?" Triana inquired, curious of the hesitation and this enigmatic benefactor her ally spoke of.

"Not important." The Herald stated. Turbo was getting bored and decided to have some fun. "What is important is that you-" Turbo began to swing his hand back and forth through the hologram. "-Stop that THIS INSTANT!"

"What're ya gonna do? _Lecture_ me to death?" Turbo had obvious problems with authority, which had gotten him in trouble more than once on his world.

"You've forced my hand..." The Herald sighed. Upon contact with the hologram again, Turbo got shocked by a jolt of static electricity and fell down.

"How'd you do that?" Koal was mystified by this illusion.

"The hologram device is also an electric pulse generator." The Herald explained.

"No, the illusion, what kind of magic is this?"

"It's not magic, it's technology."

"Technology?" Triana was also confused, having come from a world with no computers or even devices that could harness electricity.

"Great, now we gotta explain technology to Triana and Koal." Turbo whispered to Venqas.

"Herald, what should we be doing now?" Venqas ignored his friends' chatter, as he was already up the creek without a paddle.

"I am unsure of your location or what is going on, so you four are on your own." The Herald said. "Over and out." The hologram disappeared.

"GREAT. Now we get to be stranded on this world and die!" Venqas went crazy immediately. "I knew I shoulda stayed behind!"

"Ven, calm down..." Triana put her hand on his shoulder

"We're stranded! We're-"

"Dude, there's a city just over the hill!" Turbo called from atop a mound of rubble. "We can get help there."

"Do you think we'll freak out anyone with our unusual appearances?" Triana asked.

"We'll be fine." Koal asserted. "It's not like we've got any other choice." The four heroes left the wreckage of the gummi ship behind and headed for the nearby city.

**Chapter 23: Guns and Keys**

The heroes approached the city, which was not unlike the city of Hyrule's Castle Town as it too had a wall built around it. They found themselves blocked by a locked gate standing between them and entry.

"Great..." Ven groaned. "Locked out."

"Stop being such a pessimist." Koal glared. "It'll get you nowhere."

"If the gate is locked, the logical thing to do is knock..." Turbo might not have been the smartest member of the group, but simple solutions to simple problems never escaped his grasp of knowledge.

"Wait, what if the gate is locked for a reason?" Venqas asked. "Is it to keep us out, or to keep something in?"

"Well, we'll find out soon enough." Turbo knocked on the gate. All of a sudden, a familiar swarm of black shadows darted around on the ground and turned into even more-familar three-dimensional, jet-black bug-like monsters with glowing yellow eyes.

"Heartless!" Venqas summoned his keyblade, the otherworldly lovechild of a broadsword and a house key shined like a light as it appeared from nowhere. Triana drew her father's master sword from its golden scabbard and raised her new shield like a stone wall of protection. Turbo summoned his Piko Piko hammer and spun it around by its rod before grasping it firmly in his gloved hand. Koal opened her maw wide and began to let yellow sparks of electricity loose from her dagger-like teeth.

The shadows attacked like a swarm of vultures closing in on carrion. Ven swung his keyblade at the monsters that approached him, cutting them up as he went. Triana did the same thing with her master sword, it glowed with power as she sliced them to pieces. One Heartless attempted to sneak up behind Turbo, but as it turned three-dimensional, he flattened it with his hammer, and proceeded to make a quip about how it could have saved itself some time by not going three-dimensional at all. Another took him head-on, only for Turbo to swing at it with his hammer and score a home run in the process. For some reason, the most of the Heartless targeted Koal the most, which was a very poor decision on their part. Stupid or suicidal, the monsters did not last long a Koal unleashed a bolt of lightning at them from her mouth, vaporizing them almost instantly.

But the Heartless were far from done. A troop of humanoid Heartless donning armor and lances emerged out of a chaotic dark portal. Triana swung at this new type of Heartless, only for her blade to be blocked by a twisted, dented lance of dark metal. Turbo swung his hammer at the armored Heartless, only for it to bounce off the monster's armor as if it were made of rubber. Koal fired a jolt of surging electricity at the monsters, doing little more than nothing.

The Heartless made their move, one of them swinging its lance at Venqas, only to be blocked by his Keyblade. Triana raised her Hylain shield to defend against a jab from another Heartless' dark lance. She retaliated by finding an opening in the Heartless' attack and hacked it in two with her sword.

"Where are they all coming from?" Triana grunted as she blocked another attack from a different Heartless.

"It's like there's a fricking Heartless factory that just went into overtime!" Turbo quipped, hopelessly swatting the monsters with his hammer. All of a sudden, the Heartless began to converge on the same spot and became a mass of pure darkness, waiting to decide on a form.

"Not this again! They're combining into a single stronger one!" Koal remembered this happening back in Hyrule, where they turned into a giant Heartless that only she could stop with her Fury power.

"Dude, it took ALL of Koal's power to beat one of those things the last time!" Turbo exclaimed, remembering the experience just as vividly as Koal. "We gotta stop them before-" There was the sound of gunfire and all of a sudden, a sleek, streamlined fireball blasted the mass of darkness to pieces before it could take form. The pieced evaporated into a dark steam that blew away with a passing wind.

"What was that?" Triana asked.

"I-I didn't do that..." Koal stuttered, surprised to see something destroy with one shot what took all of her latent power to defeat.

"You all should be more careful." A voice called from atop the wall. The heroes all looked up to see a slim young man with long brunette hair, a black leather jacket and a rifle that had a blade in place of a barrel. "The Heartless like hiding out front for easy prey."

"Hello there..." Koal grinned. The young man leaped off the wall, landing in front of the party with almost-inhuman agility.

"Thanks for the assist." Turbo gave him the thumbs-up.

"It was nothing." The young man brushed his hair to the side.

"Who are you?" Triana inquired.

"I'm Lance Leonheart." The young man introduced himself. "Gun-swordsman extraordinaire. And your name would be?..."

"Princess Triana, at your service." Triana grinned.

"Oh, pardon my rudeness, milady." Lance Leonheart chuckled, bowing, to make fun of her while still being polite. "And who might your acquaintances be?"

"Koal the dragon, Turbo the Hedgehog, and Venqas, heir to the keyblades." Triana introduced her friends one by one in a humorously formal manner.

"Keyblades, huh?" Lance remarked, looking at Ven's keyblade. It was black with chains running down it leading to a cross-guard with a blue diamond above a bat-wing design. "That's a very special weapon ya got there. Only goes to the truest of heroes... or so the legends say."

"The legends must be out of the loop..." Turbo whispered to Koal, who promptly snickered.

"That weapon of yours is nothing to groan about." Triana remarked to Lance, observing his gunblade. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Literally, she hasn't ever seen a rifle." Venqas spoke up. He suddenly felt a shock in his back, compliments of Koal.

"That's no way to talk to about a lady." Koal beamed.

"Um, how the hell are we supposed to get into the city?" Turbo asked. "Did- did everyone magically forget that we're LOCKED OUT?"

"Venqas can undo the lock using his keyblade." Lance explained. "The keyblade can open any lock, no matter what it belongs to and no matter how elaborate."

"Really?" Ven was astonished to find out that this guy he just met knew more about his weapon than him and that he had been ignorant of such a potentially useful function all this time.

Lance smirked, "Why do you think it's a key?"

"I'd never thought about that..." Until this point, Venqas was so stressed over the loss of his parents and home, and over his new predicament that he'd never once even noticed that the Keyblades were giant keys. And quite frankly, he felt very stupid about it.

"Seriously? You have a keyblade, and you don't even know how to use it?" Lance chuckled, while amused by Ven's ignorance, he still wanted to stay on his good side. "That's almost sad. If you want some help, my dad told me a lot about the Keybla-"

"No, I can figure these things out myself." Venqas declined, refusing to accept help, feeling that it would make him feel even more stupid. As Koal had once said, two desirable qualities were utterly absent from him -courage and common sense.

"Suit yourself." Lance shrugged.

"C'mon, Ven, unlock the door!" Turbo snapped, patient as he ever was.

"Uh... how?" Venqas, despite his facade, had to admit, he knew absolutely nothing about Keyblades, which sucked, being that he had THREE.

"Just point your Keyblade at the lock, and it will unlock automatically." Lance tried his hardest not to make a smart-mouthed crack about how Venqas said he didn't need his help to figure out his own weapon. Koal similarly didn't feel like making such a remark, being that it was on everyone's mind, and redundancy was not a thing she fancied. Venqas pointed his Keyblade at the lock and a beam of light began to radiate from the Keyblade and shot into to lock, just like when he locked the Keyhole in Hyrule. The lock clicked and the gates jumped open as if on a will of their own.

"Shall we?" Lance asked, fancying himself a gentleman.

"After you." Triana giggled.

As the heroes proceeded into the town, Venqas began to wonder- If his Keyblade could lock Keyholes and open locks, did it work the other way around? Could he -if he so desired- lock locks and unlock locked Keyholes? He then stopped dead in his tracks, coming by a startling realization: The Herald said that the villain behind the evil plot his team had been assembled to foil had somehow unlocked the Keyholes of certain worlds, his island for instance. Could it be that the mastermind of this conspiracy had a Keyblade of his own?

"Venqas, hurry up!" Triana called, snapping Venqas out of his trance-like meditation. He realized that he'd fallen behind when he stopped. As he walked back up to the group, he couldn't help but feel like telling the team his realization would get him dismissed as crazy, as only people with strong hearts could wield Keyblades.

"C'mon Ven, we're wating on ya!" Turbo yelled. Venqas continued forward, realizing that he had stopped again.

But what of his own heart? Surely if one as weak as he could hold a Keyblade, surely at least one person with a heart consumed by darkness would have a Keyblade. The Herald had never said that only the good guys could wield Keyblades; what if -theoretically speaking- an irredeemably evil villain had a strong heart and will, stronger than those of the noblest of heroes. Could he have his own Keyblade? But if they were evil, then they had darkness in their hearts. But everyone had darkness in their hearts, and who's to say evil and darkness are not the same thing? But there was no way a Heartless could use a Keyblade, being called Heart_less_.

"Ven, if you stop one more time, we're going to slam the door in your face!" Koal barked, causing Venqas to realize he'd stopped one too many times.

"What good would that do?" Ven asked as he rejoined the group. "I'd just unlock it again."

"I meant we'd slam it so that it would hit you in the face."


	9. Rebellion With A Cause

**Chapter 24: A World at Gunpoint**

The heroes and Lance entered the town, which looked like medieval village-meets-steampunk elements, having both one-story stone buildings and brass pipes sticking out every which way, as if purely for decoration. The empty streets were paved with a strange, blue granite, unlike anything the heroes had seen before. The town as a whole was gloomy and disheartening, truly it had seen better days.

"So, what is this place called?" Triana was curious of what such an odd place could be called, she expected something along the lines of "Ruin Town," "Blackwater City," or "Lost Village." The answer surprised her,

"The Radiant Garden." Lance was happy to reply, almost as if he enjoyed saying the name, rather saying it to Triana.

"Doesn't look very _radiant_ to me." Koal remarked, feeling downright depressed just looking at the place, "And I don't see how a single PLANT could grow here, much less a _garden_."

"I didn't name it." Lance was lighthearted in his retort. "Some people still call it by its old name: _Hollow Bastion_."

"Hollow Bastion? Sounds more appropriate, but not very welcoming."

"Once again, I did not name the damn place." Lance let off another lighthearted chuckle. Triana responded with a soft, sweet giggle.

"Okay, next order of business: you do know there's a giant space-laser-cannon floating above this world, right?" Turbo was never one to beat around the bush when it came to the big stuff. Rather, he took a flamethrower to it -one with a questionable gas supply that is.

"Ah, yes..." Lance had been hoping, praying that he did not have to answer. "One day, it appeared in a flash of black light. A nut in a black cloak appeared outside the city, demanding that we reactivate the once-condemned Heartless Manufactury, or he would destroy us all."

"Heartless Manufactury?" Turbo asked, a chill running down his quills. He made a joke about a Heartless factory earlier, but he was now horrified that such a thing existed, in an inhabited place no less!

"About twenty years ago..." Lance recounted the stories that his father had told him growing up, "Our leader, Ansem the Wise was betrayed by his treacherous apprentice, Xehanort, who was throughly obsessed with the latent darkness in the heart. So, against his master's wishes, he built a device that could synthesize Heartless, which I believe you are familiar with."

"TOO familiar." Triana groaned.

"Anyway, he used it to create stronger Heartless with special abilities. He sought to create an army, but in doing so, became a Heartless himself. Ignoring the parts unrelated to the Heartless Manufactury, the people of Radiant Garden declared it off-limits and blocked it off so that it could never be used again."

"Why didn't you just DESTROY THE DAMN THING?" Turbo and Koal barked in unison, thinking the exact same thing.

"The power source of the factory was too dangerous -too volatile to be disposed of or destroyed without any repercussions."

"You could shoot it into space."

"Oh yeah, like they've got a space-catapult the size of a frigging castle just _lying_ around." Venqas tried his hand at being smarmy, but judging from the silent stares he got, it clearly wasn't his strong suit.

"As I was saying..." Lance continued, "The dude in the black cloak told us that if we didn't let him use the Heartless factory, he'd destroy us all with the cannon, and there wasn't a damn thing we could do. You know how the area outside the city is a wasteland? Well, it used to be a lush forest... until he decided a show of strength was in order..."

"Oh my god!" Triana gasped.

"Stupid cowards are too dumb to make their own Heartless factory so they use a doomsday treat to commandeer someone else's..." Koal was disgusted by the cowardice of their enemies.

"Only cowards use fear as a weapon." Triana wholeheartedly agreed.

"Man, how are we gonna beat an entire goddamn army of Heartless?" Turbo asked, being the only one worried about both the Heartless factory and the Eclipse Cannon.

Triana turned to her comrades, "Are you all thinking what I'M thinking?"

"That this was a bad idea?" Venqas had his his usual zest for adventure.

"That we should smash that factory?" Turbo cracked his knuckles.

"That Lance is kinda cute?" Koal giggled. "You know... for a human."

"Sort of; definitely; and he actually is." Triana retorted to her three teammates in order.

Ven's eyes blazed open, at Triana calling Lance 'cute.' Triana turned back to Lance, ready to lend a helping hand,

"If you all are in trouble with the Heartless, we'd be more than happy to help." Triana offered to Lance, "We've got sort of a thing with the Heartless, and we'd like to mess with the factory if it would hurt them."

"Then I am in your debt." Lance nodded his head. "We could use all the help available. Come with me, I'll introduce you to the others."

"Others?" Turbo asked.

**Chapter 25: The Rebellion**

Lance lead the heroes to a battered old cellar door. He knocked three times. The door opened slightly.

"Who goes there?" A raspy voice demanded in stereotypical gatekeeper fashion.

"It's me, Lance." Lance stated. The barrel of a shotgun poked out, pointing at the others. "And I've brought some guests." The shotgun retracted and the door opened. One by one, the heroes entered. The steps lead down to a cellar, which seemed to be modeled after an old-fashioned Prohibition-Era bar. Surrounding a poker table in the center was a girl with spiky blonde hair and a giant broadsword who wore a white t-shirt and brown canvas jeans; an old man with goggles on his forehead and a pipe in his mouth; and a young man wearing a scarf and a green tunic and grey shorts.

"See, I'm not really fond of the idea of Heartless using our town as their main source of artifical Heartless, so I built a rebel group to combat them." Lance explained. "These are my friends, Sylvia Strife, Cid and the great ninja Ronald."

"That's Rokka!" The boy with the scarf snapped, obviously preferring an odd codename to his underwhelming real name.

"Fine... _Rokka_..." Lance acquiesced with a deadpan snort.

"Who're these whippersnappers?" The old man, Cid, inquired, quite rudely.

"Oh, these are some new recruits I met just today. Triana, Koal the dragon, Turbo the hedgehog and-"

"Well, if it ain't Sora!" Cid remarked, upon seeing Venqas. He right away realized that he had erred, as this young man was much younger than Sora after all these years and had a different face and hairstyle to boot, "Wait -nah, you ain't Sora. But you LOOK like him, what with the spiky hair and baggy pants. Guess I just call's 'em like I see's em."

"It's okay, Sora's my father. My name's Venqas, by the way." Venqas was surprised to find that this old man knew his father. Guess that was one more thing his parents were 'sorry for not telling him about.' But then again, what parent would tell their child that they spent their teenage years fighting world-eating demons of darkness?

"Wow, guess the apple doesn't fall far." Cid remarked, further inspecting Venqas. "Same sense 'a style, spiky hair, lemme guess, even a Keyblade."

"Three."

"Wow, you must be quite the ass-kicker, eh?"

"To be honest, I'd rather not be doing this sort of crap. Fighting Heartless, risking my life-"

"You do realize what a pussy you sound like, right?" Turbo asked. "Whining isn't going to get you outta this fix, so buck up or fade out!"

"And c'mon, it's obvious Triana likes guys who rise to the occasion and can stay positive when the world goes to hell around them." Koal added. "Look at how fangirl she's going over Lance." Venqas realized that Triana hadn't left Lance's side since they met and she had been laughing at every joke he made.

"What's that have to do with me?"

"Um, she obviously likes you and you obviously like her..." Koal got along with Turbo because she didn't believe in beating around the bush either. Burn it down!

"Wait... wha?..." Ven's mouth hung open in disbelief. Triana? Like him? Him like Triana? His face glowed a bright crimson, which prompted him to pull his shirt up over his face.

Turbo strolled over to the table to ind out what everyone was talking about before they had come in.

"We need to shut down that damn factory once and for all." Sylvia spoke to the rest of the rebellion, her eyes burning with a fiery determination, no doubt fueled by rage.

"But how are we gonna do that without the world getting blown to bits?" Lance asked, simply looking for a solution to the problem where everyone in town didn't end up as ashes in a huge hole in the ground formerly known as Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden.

"You know, I've been thinking..." Turbo approached the group, stating a theory that had been boiling in his head for a while now. "What if this is all just a bluff? Think about it. There's probably a dozen more useful ways the bad guys could be using that cannon -blowing up areas they can't conquer, killing off tough enemies with a single blast, destroying enemy space travel; Why use it for extortion where they'll never need to fire it?" Turbo was quick to answer his own question, "Answer? It's not powerful enough to destroy the city."

"But it was able to wipe out the entire forest." Sylvia wasn't convinced that this hedgehog was in the right mind. "You don't think that it could do that to us?"

"C'mon, wouldn't it be simple to just use whatever power it has for a show of strength and never have to fire it again so long as people are scared? So simple a monkey could do it!"

"Kid, did ya ever stop to wonder WHY we're taking the threat seriously?" Cid interjected. "Who says it ain't at full power? For all we know, what they did to the forest was just a fraction of what it can really do."

"But they couldn't kill the four of us?" Turbo scoffed.

"Come again?"

"You see, we came to this world on a ship, but the cannon fired at our vessel twice and sent us hurtling down to the wasteland below." Triana recounted. "But we survived _two_ blasts from the cannon, when one should have, in theory been enough to kill all of us. Something smells rotten here..."

"A little recon might be in order." Lance agreed. "First thing tomorrow, we investigate the Heartless factory. There's gotta be some stooge in there talking with the head man, so we find out what's really going on with the cannon and the factory."

"Tomorrow?" Triana asked.

"Well, it's gonna be sundown in a few minutes and you four need to rest."

"Oh crap... sundown?" Triana groaned.

"What's the matter, got a curfew?" Cid chuckled with a smug grin.

"It's just that... uh..." Triana couldn't think of how to put what was going to happen. But it would appear that a visual aid was the only thing required. She doubled over and became cloaked in silky gray fur. Her teeth became sharp and her ears became even more pointy than before. In a matter of moments, she had transformed into a large wolf. "...you get the picture..."

"Now there's somethin' ya don't see everyday." Cid dryly remarked.

**Chapter 26: On Everyone's Mind**

It had been a while since Triana had entered her wolf form, and now she felt odd being back in it. Nothing seemed to annoy her more recently than being hurled into her lupine form when the sun went to rest, forced to re-acquaint herself with her body and all the annoyances that came with it: the heavy fur; the lack of opposable thumbs; the awkward tail; the cold nose; the feral urgings; and especially walking on all fours. It was like her own personal version of hell, only made slightly more tolerable with the knowledge that she still lived to carry out her life.

Night's embrace had taken over Hollow Bastion. Triana and Koal both curled up by the fireplace, its orange glow making Koal's black scales shine like the burning wood that fueled the flames. In her wolf form, Triana always felt most comfortable talking to Koal, due to the young dragon being the furthest thing from human out of all of her friends, and consequently, the easiest to relate to.

"I'll never get used to this wolf form." Triana confided to Koal, "It's like my body doesn't like being a wolf, but once I get used to it, I turn back into a human, which my body consequently doesn't like either."

"Must be rough." Koal was sympathetic to Triana, she could tell the poor girl jumping between human and wolf all the time really took its toll on her sanity.

"It is." Triana dipped her head down. "I don't even know if I'll ever stop changing. If I'll be stuck changing back and forth forever."

"Well, at least you... nah, there really isn't a good side to it." Koal didn't want to kid Triana, she knew that Triana was basically screwed over like this and trying to sugar-coat it would only make it worse.

Meanwhile, Venqas, Turbo and Lance spoke of various things, the past day's events, the logicality of the villains' usage of the Eclipse Cannon, and eventually, how Ven got his Keyblades,

"So, your father gave you his keyblades before he was captured?" Lance summarized what Venqas had just told him, astonished to hear of Ven's parents being kidnapped and his island being lost to the Heartless.

"It was the weirdest day of my life..." Ven no longer wished to relive that particular memory, if only because it reminded him of what a living hell his live had mutated into, "I keep wanting it to all be a bad dream, but then I realize that I'm actually living this nightmare for real."

"Dude, we're past the fact that you don't like this fix! Look at the rest of us -we're trying to make the most of this situation!" Turbo was sick and tired of Venqas being such a downer, unable to comprehend anyone lacking a lust for adventure.

"If you don't man up soon, we're considering just stealing your keyblades and leaving you for dead." Koal approached the group, looking for a chance to help hammer the point into Venqas' thick head. But in her frustration, Koal had forsaken her manners, which shocked everyone present as to what she could say after losing her temper,

"What?" Venqas was shocked, Koal had been rude and sarcastic before, but now she was almost trying to bully him,

"You're the weakest guy on the team, the biggest coward on the team and your weapons are what we need, not your apathetic, whiny, useless ass!"

"Uh..." Turbo was stunned by this sudden outburst on Koal's part. She hadn't been Little-Ms.-Nice up till this point, but now she was going just a little too far in getting her point across.

Venqas was tired, confused, frustrated, and Koal losing her cool was not helping in the slightest, "Koal, the LAST thing I need right now is a dragon-"

"Listen, you brooding bozo, stop whining and start being helpful!" Koal refused to let Venqas get a word in edgewise, too upset with her apathetic teammate to give him an ounce of her respect,

"Okay... getting out of the middle..." Lance knew when a situation was evolving from 'yelling' to 'verbal abuse fight.' He got out of his seat and strolled over to the fireplace, taking notice of Triana.

"Uh... Hi!" Triana awkwardly yipped as Lance sat down next to her. His face looked offput by a talking wolf for a moment. "Oh... sorry, did I startle you?"

"Sort of. I'm still getting used to the idea of working with a talking wolf."

"Oh, I'm not like this all the time. When the sun comes up I turn human again, clothes, weapons, everything. This whole thing happen about a week ago, I was cursed by a warlock... it's a long story..."

"I would assume so." Lance chuckled.

"So uh, what's the deal here with your rebel group?" Triana was interested to know how Lance had gathered such an odd group of people without the help of a dude in a brown cloak.

"Well, Rokka and Sylvia were my childhood friends," Lance explained. "Cid was a friend of our parents, and he's a damn good mechanic who's helped us with some of our stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"Ya know, motorcycles and that junk. Not that we get to use them, but we have them, which is something. He also claims to know how to fix a spaceship, but it's not like we'd be able to use one without the Eclipse Cannon frying us."

"Hm... do you think he could fix our spaceship?" Triana knew that the Gummi ship needed to be repaired if they were to ever leave this world and continue with their mission, and she was hanging out with a group who had a mechanic in their numbers, so...

"Depends, how bad is it?"

"Does the phrase, 'scrap metal' mean anything to you?"

"Yeah, he can fix it." Lance chuckled, a lighthearted grin spread across his face, something Triana enjoyed seeing. Were it only on Venqas' face, though. Triana looked over to Ven squabbling with Koal over their idealogical differences. Of course, "squabbling" was a Hylain term for "getting in each others' faces and yelling at the top of their lungs."

Triana sighed, wishing that Koal could see things from Venqas' perspective. He was apathetic, yes. He was afraid to risk his life. He whined a lot, but he was still grieving over the loss of his world and worrying about having a disposition where his life would be in constant peril. Was his refusal to get over the loss and transition into his new life a mark of weakness, or a cry for help that fell on deaf ears?

**Writer's Notes:**

This part was notably boring for me to write, due to the lack of action and overdose of conversations. The next part's better.


	10. Magically Heroic

**Chapter 27: Killing Time**

Morning had come, but one could hardly tell the difference because of the black clouds in the sky. In Lance's basement, the rebels and the heroes gathered around the table to discuss their plans for the day.

"So, what's the plan?" Turbo asked, hoping to bust some Heartless skulls today.

"Koal, Sylvia, Rokka and Triana will come with me to spy on the Heartless factory." Lance loaded bullets into his gunblade. He snapped the barrel into place and hoisted the weapon onto his shoulder, "Turbo, Venqas and Cid are gonna stay here to hold down the fort."

"Aw... DUDE!" Turbo groaned, hating being left out. "I gotta stay here with these losers while you all go and do recon?"

"You aren't exactly subtle." Koal asserted. "If we're gonna do this, we're going to need to be subtle. And last I checked, you're a talking blue hedgehog with a pink mohawk and a large hammer. Kind of an antonym to 'subtle.'"

"And you're a purple and black dragon with a bright pink belly and wings." Turbo countered, giving Koal a taste of her own deadpan medicine. Sadly for him, it was a flavor she didn't mind.

"Aerial surveillance. You'd be surprised how rarely anybody looks up."

Lance and his crew exited the basement, leaving Turbo, Venqas and Cid behind to gather dust.

"What now?" Turbo groaned, having an inherent hatred of staying in one place for extended periods of time.

"Hey, if you two're looking for something to do, why don't you go pay a visit to Merlina?" Cid could tell their looks marked them "bored out of their damn minds."

"That Sorceress from _Sonic and the Black Knight_?" Turbo jumped back with an astonished look upon his face.

"What's _Sonic and the Black Knight_?" Venqas raised an eyebrow.

"A book my father wrote. He claimed it was autobiographical. My mother claimed he was just making up an excuse for forgetting a date."

"Naw, this gal's the granddaughter of Merlin the wizard." Cid was unfamiliar with Turbo's reference, but didn't let it throw him off his focus. "She's been helpin' us with magic. I was thinking she could teach Venqas a thing or two, since Merlin taught Sora about magic."

"Yeah, maybe you'll be more useful if you learned some magic." Turbo suggested.

"Wait... magic? Me? Learn?" Ven sputtered.

"Tell her Cid sent ya." Cid instructed with a casual grin.

Venqas and Turbo approached a stone building with a sturdy wooden door that had a flame symbol engraved onto it. It was an old building, but one that was in markedly good repair.

"This is the place... I guess." Venqas remarked, reading a note Cid had given to him detailing the address. The note read, in no uncertain terms, "Old building, 'bout a block over with a flame symbol on the door. Ya can't miss it."

Venqas threw caution to the wind and knocked on the door. All of a sudden, the symbol lit up like fire, flickering a bright orange-hue.

"Whoa!" Ven gasped, fumbling a few steps backwards before Turbo caught him with his hand against Ven's back. The door creaked open to reveal a young woman in a royal-looking purple and gold cloak. She looked to be about Ven's age, perhaps a year or two older. Her skin was pale, a shade that denoted that she almost never went outside, for there were more interesting things inside.

"Can I help you?" The young woman's voice carried a faint English accent, like she was something out of medieval times. Looking upon her face, Ven could almost see Triana, as if the two were related by some anomaly. But it was just a passing thought in his cluttered mind. He spoke to the young woman,

"Uh, are you Merlina?" Ven was nervous, Turbo having made all sorts of jokes the whole way here about sorceresses doing everything from turning teenage boys into their pet cats to setting them on fire just for kicks.

"Why are you here?" The young woman glared at the mention of her name,

"Well... I uh, that is..." Venqas didn't know what to say right here, imagining saying the wrong thing and getting turned into a flaming house cat for it.

"Cid sent us." Turbo spoke up, as if giving a password.

"Oh, then Merlina I am." The young woman giggled, her demeanor changing from mysterious and off-putting to cute and inviting. "Please, come in..."

**Writer's Notes:**

Since apparently I didn't make it obvious what age certain characters are, Triana is fourteen-fifteen years old, Venqas is around fifteen years old, which makes Merlina roughly sixteen or seventeen, in case you were wondering.

**Chapter 28: Making Magic 101**

Ven and Turbo entered the young woman's home at her beckon. The door closed behind them, as if on its own free will. The house was one large room. Papers were scattered all over the granite brick floor. Lanterns lined the walls, creating light without the need for any electricity. Countless books lined the numerous bookshelves, ranging from spell books and ancient tomes to video game guides and Japanese manga.

"So, Cid sent you two?" Merlina inquired.

"Yeah, I'm Venqas and this is Turbo the Hedgehog." Venqas was quick with the introductions. "We needed to kill some time and Cid sent us here, said you could teach me a thing or two."

"You look sort of familiar." Merlina inspected Venqas closer, paying special attention to his face and hair. "It's like I've seen you somewhere before..."

"Couldn't possibly." Venqas was never smooth with the ladies.

"I know I've seen someone who LOOKS like you..." Merlina continued to inspect Venqas.

"I'll leave you two kids to play." Turbo began to walk away wearing a smug grin. "If you need me, I'll be touching something I probably shouldn't!"

"Oh, I got it!" Merlina came to a conclusion. "You're the new Keyblade bearer!"

"Yes I am." Venqas summoned his Keyblades, as if to show off.

"Three?" Merlina gasped in pure excitement. "Wow! That is so COOL!"

"And here we have the fangirl in her natural habitat." Turbo gawked. "In a room filled with books and squeeing over a boy with spiky hair." Merlina shot Turbo a nasty look, and all of a sudden, he was trapped in a glowing white bubble of magic!

"Wow..." Venqas was impressed by this display of what magic could do.

"Yes, it's what I do." Merlina giggled. "So, you're here to learn some magic?"

"I guess so."

"Good, I've been hoping to teach you some cool spells."

"Like ones that could get me out of this s-"

"Don't even THINK about going all 'downer' on us!" Turbo commanded from inside the bubble. "...Uh, hey. Not for nothing, but how much air do I have left?" The bubble disappeared and Turbo fell on his backside. "That was a little unnecessary.

"So, the magic?" Ven asked. Merlina waved her hand and a large stone platform appeared in the middle of the room, large enough for someone to stand and freely move around on.

"We'll start you off with the basics." Merlina got onto the platform and helped Venqas up. "A simple elemental spell..." She motioned to a book and it floated over to her. "Let's see... Earth... Freeze... Wind... Fire... Thunder... Ah, this one's good." She conjured up a staff and a training dummy. She pointed the staff at the dummy. A raging high-pressure torrent of ice-cold water was unleashed from the tip and blasted the dummy across the room. "Wategun." She grinned. "But we'll start you out with the basic level, 'water." Another training dummy appeared in place of the first one. "Point your Keyblade at it, clear your mind, imagine the enemy being swept away by a flood and say the word 'water'." Venqas pointed his Keyblade at the training dummy and imagined a flash flood sweeping the dummy into oblivion.

"Water..." He whispered. A blast of water shot from the Keyblade's tip, but it propelled him backwards into a wall instead of doing so to the dummy. Turbo burst into laughter.

"Oh my gosh, are you okay?" Merlina jumped off the platform ran over to Venqas.

"I'm fine..." Venqas sighed, more than a little dazed. His thoughts were going a whole other way-

"That was incredible!" His mind raced, "I just used magic! And imagine how useful that spell could be -it could make enemies more vulnerable to Koal's electricity breath or it could be used to rust metal enemies! This freaking rocks!"

"Uh, can we try a different spell?" Venqas did his best to mask his excitement, as if he didn't want anyone to know that he was enjoying himself for the first time.

"Uh, sure." Merlina opened her spellbook and flipped through the pages, "Maybe this will suit your fancy -Cure." She waved her staff. Venqas was bathed in a green light and the bruises he had sustained from slamming into the wall dissolved instantly! "See? Easy. Now you try."

"Sweet, but who do I practice it on?" Ven asked. Merlina shot Turbo an evil grin,

"Don't look at me..." Turbo began to creep backwards, wearing a worried frown upon his face.

"Wategun." Merlina fired a raging blast of chilling water from her staff to knock down Turbo. "Try it on him. Just raise your Keyblade, imagine him being healed and say the word 'cure." Venqas did just this.

"Cure." Turbo's bruises vanished instantly in a shroud of green light.

"Wow, you're a natural!" Merlina cheered at Venqas' success. "Maybe it's time I taught you an advanced spell."

"Sure, what the heck." Venqas let a little smile escape his watch.

The young sorceress flipped through the book, trying to find a suitable spell for Venqas. Sadly, the advanced spells were some of her least favorite, "Stop? Useless... Gravity? Impractical... Magnet? Boring... Reflect? Seriously, who uses that?...Ah, here's a good one -Holy." She summoned a swath of training dummies on the podium and then she went onto the podium. She slammed the edge of her staff on the ground and a white light blasted all the dummies to smithereens!

"Now THAT is magic." Turbo remarked. Venqas was eager to try it and jumped onto the podium.

"Okay, how's this work?" He asked.

"Just concentrate your energy at the tip of the Keyblade and let it all loose with a single blast." Venqas began to accumulate all of his willpower at the tip of his weapon. He then raised the Keyblade high... but nothing happened. A spark flashed on the end as if to tell him he did it wrong.

"Um..."

"Oh, I guess your power is all used up." Merlina giggled. "You're new to magic, so I should have figured that you'd have less MP."

"MP?" Venqas asked.

"Magic Power. Once your magic power is used up, you'll have to let it recharge for a while before you can do any more."

"Still, woulda been kick-ass if you'd learned that 'Holy' thing." As much as Turbo didn't like being left out of the action, he was glad that Venqas now had a chance of becoming a credit to the team.

"Oh, one more thing..." Merlina summoned a treasure chest out of thin air. She opened it, revealing a black hoodie with short sleeves and a zipper. She took it out, unfolded it and displayed it to Venqas.

"What's that?" Venqas asked.

"It belonged to Sora, your predecessor. Come to think of it, you look a lot like him... Maybe that's why I thought you looked so familiar."

"Sora was my father." Venqas was surprised to keep hearing about his father and how much he supposedly looked like him.

"Wow, really?" Merlina gasped,

"Hold on a sec, you said you thought Ven looked familiar and then recognized him as the new Keyblade bearer, but you didn't know Sora and he were related?" Turbo interjected, never one to be on the same page as anybody else, "Then how'd you know about Venqas being the Keyblade bearer?"

"My friend, the Herald told me about him." Merlina stated. "He asked me to teach him some magic so that he'd be more versatile and-"

"Wait, you know the Herald?"

"Well, it's more of a pen-pal/co-worker thing. He was very adamant that you get this hoodie."

"Why? It's just a hoodie... right?"

"Put it on!" Merlina ignored Venqas' question. She handed to hoodie to Venqas and he cautiously put it on over his shirt, leaving the zipper open. It draped down to the midsection of his torso and ran up in the back. Aside from that, it fit almost perfectly, the black fabric complimenting his white t-shirt."My, my... you look quite dashing in that outfit..."

"Really?" Venqas asked with an excited grin.

"Yes, you should show your friend, Triana."

"You know about Triana?" Venqas asked.

"The Herald told me all about the four of you." Merlina nodded, "And he told me that you might have a thing for the Hylain Princess..."

"Even the HERALD makes cracks about us?" Venqas exclaimed in disbelief. Why did everyone think they liked each other? Sure, Triana was cute and all, but he had never shown direct affection for her. But apparently thinking someone is cute is enough for other people to start planning your wedding...

"Oh, before I forget, I should tell you that that hoodie has very special magical powers." Merlina derailed Venqas' train of thought.

"Like what?"

"You'll find out soon enough. Why spoil the surprise?"

"Last 'surprise' I had was my world getting eaten by the Heartless, so naturally, I don't like surprises."

"Well, this is one of the more 'know it when you see it' surprises." Merlina was under orders from the Herald to let Venqas figure out the hoodie's powers on his own, but that wasn't to say she couldn't have a little fun with Venqas' head, "Not one of those 'tell you what it is' surprises. And trust me, you wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"You're a sorceress AND an otaku." Turbo smirked, "Why SHOULDN'T we believe you?" Merlina snapped her fingers and the floor below Turbo's feet became covered in a fine, slippery sheet of ice. Turbo began to fumble and fell on his backside, the cold ice sending a chill up his spine. "That was uncalled for..."

**Chapter 29: Stratermegy and Burning Crud**

Lance, Triana, Koal, Rokka and Sylvia stood atop a cliff looking down upon a large building with complex pipes and gears everywhere. It was a fortress of darkness and a factory of nightmares.

"The Heartless factory." Lance said, trying to set the mood for his allies.

"So, what's the idea here?" Triana asked, cracking her knuckles. "Are we going to knock the place over?"

"No, this is recon, as in COVERT." Sylvia shook her head. "That's why we didn't want your friend with the Keyblades to come. He'd have Heartless all over us in a few seconds."

"His Keyblades WOULD attract unwelcome attention from those vile creatures." Triana nodded her head.

"More like he'd mess up and get us all captured..." Koal grumbled.

"Hey, stop talking about Venqas like that!" Triana snapped at Koal. "He's a coward and a whiner, yes, but he works just as hard as the rest of us! You can't go around bullying him because he's not enthusiastic about being in danger!"

"Um, Triana?" Lance tapped Triana on the shoulder. "We appear to have attracted undue attention." He pointed down to a swarm of Heartless approaching from below, having been attracted by Triana's sudden outburst.

"...Crap..."

"So much for stealth! Let's go!" Koal dove off the cliff and let loose a searing cloud of fire to singe the Heartless below. She spread her wings and parachuted to the ground where the monsters' ashes scattered as she flapped her wings.

"Koal, we're trying to be covert because if we aren't, the bad guys will blow up the goddamn planet!" Lance barked at the brash young dragoness.

"Turbo said that if the Eclipse cannon COULD blow up a planet, they'd be using it offensively somewhere else not for extortion!" All of a sudden, an armor-clad Heartless snuck up behind Koal and struck her with the broad side of a sword grafted onto its armor. Her consciousness once again escaped her at the most inopportune time.

"Koal!" Triana called to her unconscious ally. More Heartless appeared around the remaining heroes, pointing their swords in their faces.

"Well this sucks..." Rokka remarked as he and his allies dropped their weapons. The Heartless proceeded to march them down the cliff, gathering their weapons for whatever reason.

"Okay, now what?" Lance whispered to his allies. "They should have killed us on the spot. Why didn't they, now that we're unarmed?"

"No figuring with Heartless." Rokka shrugged.

"You're questioning THAT kind of fortune?" Triana scoffed. "Well, looks like it's up to Turbo and Venqas..."

"I think not..." Sylvia wasn't going to let those rookies go it alone...

**Writer's Notes:**

I swear to Captain America, those Armored Guard Heartless will almost NEVER attack you, even when they have you surrounded. Weakest enemies in _Kingdom Hearts 2_. Yes, I also just said "Captain America" instead of "God."


	11. Try, Try Again

**Chapter 30: The B-Team**

"That's the way!" Merlina cheered to Venqas as he cast a spell correctly. A blast of freezing water blew away a training dummy, and not Venqas this time. It had taken all morning and afternoon, but Venqas finally learned how to cast Water without shooting himself across the room backwards in the process.

"I got it!" He called, holding his Keyblade up high victoriously, "This magic stuff is awesome!"

"That depends on your point of view." Turbo was hanging from the ceiling and bound up by glowing white chains. It was a long story, one that he would not wish to relive at any point, with a moral that was along the lines of, "Never mouth off to a sorceress."

"You're really getting the hang of it!" Merlina cheered to Venqas, who despite his apathetic exterior, was actually a very good learner when it came to magic. "You've learned three powerful spells in one day, while even trained sorcerers take one day to master a single spell."

"Really?" Venqas' eyes widened upon hearing of his alleged skill.

"Well, you haven't _mastered_ the spells, but it's impressive nonetheless that you've made such progress in a few hours."

"Great. Now how about teaching him a spell that gets me down?" Turbo called, "I'm getting a head rush... and not the good kind." Merlina snapped her fingers, the chains disappeared and Turbo fell to the ground, landing on his face. Turbo rubbed the back of his head, flustered from the sorceress' disproportionate punishments, "I officially hate magic."

"I wonder how Koal and Triana are doing." Venqas randomly changed the subject while casting cure on Turbo for the umpteenth time. All of a sudden, there was a knocking on the door. It opened, revealing Sylvia, who was covered in blood, cuts, claw marks and bruises. She slammed the door behind her, as if to keep someone from following her in.

"Sylvia? Are you okay?" Merlina gasped at Sylvia's injuries. "What happened?"

"We screwed up the recon and got captured. The guards found us and took the team alive. I'm the only one who got away."

"Do you need to sit down?" Merlina asked, "Maybe a potion or a healing spell?"

"Maybe..." Sylvia could barely stand. She glanced to the right, seeing Venqas and Turbo. "What are THESE bozos doing here?" She asked, with a flustered scowl.

"Hey!" Venqas and Turbo snapped in unison at being called "bozos."

"I was just teaching Venqas some magic and Turbo was here because he was bored." Merlina explained.

"Well it's a good thing they stayed here, because their stupid friends are the ones who screwed us over!"

"What?" Venqas was stunned at the very thought of Triana and Koal possibly turning traitor, "They'd never-"

"The girl and the dragon started arguing and yelling, which ended up giving our location away to the guards." Sylvia was quick to clarify that Triana and Koal hadn't messed up the mission intentionally, "The dragon went wild and attacked some guards that came to investigate, got knocked out and then the Heartless guards captured us. I got away, but the others are still trapped."

"What were they arguing about?" Venqas couldn't possibly imagine what caused Triana and Koal to yell at each other at such an inappropriate time.

"You." Sylvia shot Venqas an answer that completely blindsided him, "The dragon asserted that if you had come on the recon mission, you'd have messed up and gotten everyone captured -ironic when you think about it. The girl stood up for you, started yelling and then the guards came."

"Triana... stood up for me?" Venqas was surprised to hear that there was someone on the team who actually cut him some slack.

"So we gotta rescue them, eh?" Turbo grinned, doing warm-up exercises. "Finally, some action!"

"I didn't come here for you, dingus, I came here for Merlina." Sylvia wasn't pleased with how the more professional members of the group had fared, and she wasn't going to take her chances with these two morons.

"We can help." Venqas offered, with a spark of altruism that had not existed in him until recently, "If our friends are in danger-"

"Forget it." Sylvia shot him a look that could turn Medusa to stone. "Your Keyblades would have every damn Heartless in that factory on us in a matter of seconds and your idiot hedgehog friend could probably find a thousand ways to ruin the operation." Turbo was sick of Sylvia talking about him and his friends this way, so he spoke up,

"Triana and Koal are my friends and I'm not going to just stand by while they become Heartless chow!" Turbo beamed. "You may not want us to go, but _I'm_ going!"

"Yeah..." Venqas nodded his head, "I'm not going to leave my friends to die just because a stupid blonde girl with a broadsword is being mean."

"You guys would be hazards." Sylvia protested, refusing to put such an important mission in the hands of these two jokers.

"It's not like _you're_ going anywhere." Merlina countered with a smug grin that further reminded Venqas of Triana. "You're too injured to fight. Turbo and Venqas, on the other hand are readily-able to battle and are used to fighting the Heartless."

"I'll be fine..." Sylvia did her best not to collapse, but alas, her best was not enough. She fell to her bloody knees and, struggling to get back up. Venqas and Merlina grabbed her arms and hoisted her up. They moved her over to a brown couch and laid her down, "Thanks..."

Merlina bowed her head, apologetically,"Sylvia's going need someone to take care of her injuries. I'm afraid you two are on your own."

"You can't just heal her with your spells?" Venqas had been wondering why she hadn't done this already.

Merlina shook her head. "Even my full-powered healing spell, Curagun, can only heal a little at a time." She put her hand onto Ven's shoulder, looked directly into his eyes and said, "You and Turbo can do this, I know you can!"

"Really?" Venqas asked, someone finally having faith in him came as a surprise. He had been doubting his abilities, but was this doubt truly misplaced? He saw the determined upon Merlina's face that said to him "I'm dead serious. You CAN do this," and sighed to her, "Okay... I'll do my best..."

"That's the spirit!" Turbo cheered. As they opened the door and departed for the Heartless factory, Venqas came to a startling realization -he'd forgotten to ask where the factory was!

**Chapter 31: Dungeon And Dragonesses  
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Koal's eyes flitted open, pulling herself out of her unconsciousness. She was in a dungeon, much like back in Hyrule. Only this time, Triana was the only one present.

"Mrrnh..." Koal grunted. "That was weird... How the heck did that sword knock me out cold?"

"Oh _great_, you're awake." Triana sneered with the hostility of a person who had been wronged by her best friend.

"What's with the attitude?" Koal mumbled, trying to blink the sleep out of her eyes.

"Your little stunt with those Heartless got us captured." Triana glared.

"Well maybe if you knew how to keep your voice down they wouldn't have come after us." Koal countered.

"Well maybe if you would watch your own mouth, then your own team wouldn't hate you."

"Is this about the thing with Venqas?" Koal sighed. "What do you see in that boy?"

"What I see in him is someone who's obviously not adjusting well to his new lifestyle and getting bullied for it." Triana retorted.

"His whining is insufferable."

"Maybe that's because he has something to whine about." Triana argued, "He's lost his home and family and been charged with saving the universe all in the span of a few days."

"The same thing happened to Turbo and I, but you don't hear me-"

"Venqas isn't you!" Triana barked, "He's not a dragon who grew up hearing stories about how her parents saved the world, he's a boy who lived a normal life until all of this happened to him. He's scared for his life, and he has the right to be."

"Just because he's scared doesn't give him any excuse to whine about his responsibilities, or to try running away the way he did back in Hyrule." Koal fired back.

"He wasn't thinking straight when he ran away." Triana stated. "And he came back didn't he?"

"Because he had nowhere to go."

"And he's stayed with us ever since."

"And been whining the whole damn time."

"Koal, you are so difficult!"

"Look who's talking miss 'get ticked off at the slightest hint of an insult."

"I'm starting to think insults are all you're good for!"

Koal was about to respond with a snarky comment, but she held herself back and said, "You know what? Forget it."

"Oh yeah, well I -wait what?" Triana paused, surprised by Koal's sudden shift in demeanor.

"This isn't getting us anywhere." Koal stated, "Arguing about Venqas is just going to get us both angry at each other. And _that's _what got us into this mess to begin with."

Triana took a deep breath and sighed, "You're right. We can worry about Ven later. Right now we need to worry about ourselves."

"Good, we can agree on something at least." Koal took a sigh of relief.

Triana and Koal turned to the door. "First of all, we need to get out of this cell."

"We _could _wait for Ven to get here and unlock it with his Keyblade..." Koal suggested, not wanting to follow though with the suggestion. "Or-" She fired a blast of electricity at the door, sending it flying off its hinges into a wall.

"We could do that." Triana shrugged.

"Now we just gotta find your weapons and-"

"Actually, they didn't take them away." Triana said. Koal peered over to her back to see Triana's sword and shield still in place.

"And you didn't think to cut the bars or break the lock?" She asked.

"I had to wait for you to wake up." Triana stated.

"The bars were too strong for your sword to cut through, weren't they?" Koal grinned with a snarky smile.

"There's that too..." Triana sighed.

**Chapter 32: Venqas Gets His Act Together**

Turbo and Venqas stood atop a ledge overlooking the Heartless factory, having gotten directions from Sylvia and Merlina twenty minutes earlier. The giant, looming doors were blocked by two armor-clad Heartless. Knowing the fate that had befallen their colleagues, Venqas wasn't about to do this half-assed. Knowing Turbo to be a halfway-decent strategist, -albeit, by no means a brilliant one- he looked for his teammate's input, "So, what do we do? What's the plan here?"

"Okay, I'll run down there and create a distraction." Turbo's mind blazed, readying a plan that would net him some action while achieving the desired outcome. "While the guards are focused on me, you move in and use the Keyblade to open the doors."

"Well, sounds like all we've-" Before Venqas could finish his sentence, Turbo had dashed off like a shot, "...got." Turbo made a beeline for the guards whilst brandishing his hammer, roaring to get their attention,

"_LEEROY JENKINS!_"

He dispatched both Heartless with a swing of his hammer, prompting more to rise from the darkness. He knew that he had to lead them away from the entrance so Venqas could get close. "Hey, _brainless_! Catch me if ya can!" Turbo taunted his foes and dashed off, leading the Heartless away from the door.

Venqas sneaked down to the door while the Heartless were distracted. He conjured up his Keyblade and pointed it at the doors. All of a sudden, another swarm of Heartless arose from the ground and surrounded him like a group of sharks.

"You've gotta be kidding me..." Venqas grunted, readying his weapon for combat. He really didn't want to waste time with these stupid things, but what choice did he have? He then remembered what Merlina had taught him. He raised his Keyblade and roared, "LIGHT!" He then realized he got the name of the spell wrong. He readied himself to try again, but he couldn't remember the damn name! "Flash," "Sacred," "Divine?" What was the stupid name? Turbo was running to Venqas' location, being pursued by the Heartless. Another swath of Heartless appeared right in front of him, blocking his path.

"Holy crap!" He gasped trying to stop before he crashed right into the Heartless' clutches.

"That's it! Holy!" Venqas called upon hearing his teammate's exclamation. A flash of overwhelming angelic light dominated the area, and when it cleared, the Heartless were naught but a memory of two seconds ago.

"Whoa..." Turbo was awed that Venqas possessed such a powerful technique, impressed even more that this was a technique that Venqas couldn't even get right on his first try, but he got it right when he needed it most.

"Let's go." Venqas beamed to his companion with an aura of determination emanating from him. "We've got work to do."

Turbo was genuinely surprised that Venqas was acting selfless and brave -a far cry from the whiny, cowardly, pathetic kid he knew just this morning.

He nodded his head and smiled, "Right behind you."

**Author's Note:****  
><strong>I made a serious rewrite to the "Chapter 31" part of this chapter, since I realized the original version of it (which I had called "Koal: The Logical Atheist") was nonsensical, contradicted much of Koal's characterization, and was just an excuse to write the line "The first thing my parents taught me was that logic is a religion invented to cheat fools out of their freedom." This line was very out of character for Koal in a serious situation -escaping from a cell- and served no point to the plot. If you liked the original version of that, I am sorry for changing it but I felt it portrayed Koal in a manner inconsistent with the rest of the story, wasn't worth a one-sentence joke and could be better replaced by character development for Koal and Triana.


	12. Nightmare Factory

**Chapter 33: Jailbreak**

Koal and Triana dashed through the halls of the dungeon. As Heartless appeared to block their way, they readied for combat and attacked without a second thought.

"Too bad these things don't talk..." Triana remarked, slicing one to shreds with her sword, "...otherwise we could force them to tell us where the others are."

"They left your weapons with you when they put us in the cell, so I'm guessing that the others are free by this point." Koal remarked. An armored Heartless charged her, but she had a plan THIS time. She let loose a lightning bolt at the Heartless and it began to move as she willed it. "Electromagnetism, wow I'm good." She turned her head and smashed the Heartless into a wall, taking great pleasure in doing so.

Lance pulled the trigger on his gunblade, obliterating an unfortunate Heartless with a devastating fireball. Rokka hurled a storm of ninja stars at an incoming troop of sword-wielding Heartless, chopping them to bits.

"Can you believe these idiots left our weapons with us?" Rokka laughed, remembering Lance's gunblade blasting a hole in the bars of their cell, moments after they had been put there in the first place. "Then again, they've got shadows for brains, so they're not really good for anything more technical than 'mobbing heroes' or 'eating worlds,' am I right?"

"Makes you wonder why they have a factory creating these things." Lance quipped. He stopped for a moment to contemplate that these run-of-the-mill weakling Heartless weren't worth ransoming a planet over. There had to be something more to this. Much worse. Much more dangerous. As he backed up while reloading his weapon, he bumped into something and swung his sword at it, causing it to clash with another sword -which just so happened to belong to Triana, who had been backing away from another group of Heartless.

The two warriors exchanged a glance that said, "Let's kick some ass!" and charged forward, chopping apart any Heartless that was suicidal enough to attack them.

Elsewhere, Venqas and Turbo rushed down the halls of the Heartless factory, desperately trying to locate their friends.

"Where do you suppose they keep their prisoners?" Turbo liked to make small talk to pass the time, even when lives hung in the balance. "Factories _generally _don't have holding cells."

"Why did they even take them prisoner anyway?" Venqas wondered. "Heartless usually just attack people on the spot, but these actually went to the trouble of capturing intruders. Why did they do that?"

They came across a door, Turbo jumped into the air, rolled up into a ball and tackled the door down. Venqas reminded Turbo that he could've unlocked the door, but Turbo didn't care. They found themselves in a giant room with a devilish contraption in the middle. The contraption was a rod with a sinister black crystal on the end. Beneath the crystal was a huge metal case. On a platform high atop a wall was a human-looking robot in a red cape with glowing blue eyes.

"Who's that dude?" Turbo asked as he entered a fighting stance.

"Couldn't tell ya." Venqas responded, clenching his Keyblade.

"My name is Sigma." The robot proclaimed, his voice almost human, "I am the overseer of this factory, and a member of the Black Star Organization."

"Black Star... Organization?" Venqas asked.

"It is a band of gentlemen like myself who seek dominion over the universe." Sigma boasted, applying the word 'gentlemen' quite loosely. "Lord Kixur has brought us all together so that we may claim our rightful place as-" All of a sudden, he was hoisted up off of the platform and dropped to the floor below. He looked up to see Koal flying above and gawking at him,

"You bad guys really DO like to boast, don'tcha?"

Sigma pulled himself off the ground and proclaimed, "You will soon learn the foolishness of such bravado." Triana, Lance and Rokka entered through another door that had obviously been blasted open.

"Is that?..." Triana looked over to Venqas and Turbo, "It's Ven and Turbo!" The group quickly reunited with their spiky-haired compatriots.

"Hey, the gang's all here." Turbo remarked. Koal landed next to the group and wasted no time in noticing Venqas,

"Looks like you finally decided to show up." Koal wasn't pleased to see Venqas at all, but her aggravation with him was beginning to cloud her judgment.

"Hey, I'm not the one who got you all captured in the first place!" Venqas snapped, being tired of being picked on. "We came to save you guys and THIS is the thanks we get?"

"We didn't need saving, but I guess I can give you points for coming in the first place." Koal was stingy with compliments, if you could call them that.

While the heroes were distracted, Sigma got to his feet and pressed a button on the giant canister. It hissed as it split open, grabbing the heroes' attention, steam coming from it as it separated into two and revealed something much worse...

**Chapter 34: Fusion**

The opened canister revealed a giant Heartless that looked like a giant suit of armor outfitted with heavy weapons. Its fingers were cannons, a glowing device was mounted on its chest and its eyes were cybernetic and soul-piercing. Miniguns were mounted on its shoulders, ready to shred its fearful prey to pieces in seconds.

"What is that?..." Turbo's blood turned to water at the mere sight of the monstrosity. This Heartless made the armor Heartless in Hyrule look like a ball of crumpled-up, dirty tinfoil by comparison.

"Behold, the fruits of my labor!" Sigma gloated, victoriously. "After all this time, the prototype is complete- Armorgeddon, the ultimate Heartless super weapon! Once the final version is complete, nothing will stand in our way! And wouldn't you know it, I have six 'heroes' to test this prototype on!" He pressed a button on his gauntlet and bellowed, "Eradicate them!"

The robot began to fire blasts of white energy at the heroes from its finger-cannons. The heroed were quick to scatter and prepare to retaliate. Lance fired at it with his gunblade, but the blasts did not even scratch the monster's armor. Turbo spin-tackled it, to even less avail. Venqas pointed his Keyblade at the metal monstrosity and yelled,

"Water!" He unleashed a torrent of chilling water from the tip of his Keyblade, but the robot did not seem impressed in the slightest. Koal then flew in low, hoping to shock it with her lightning breath. It punched Koal before her powers could do her bidding and she was sent flying back and collided with Venqas.

"Hey!" Venqas grunted. All of a sudden, his hoodie began to glow a mystical silver color.

"Uh, where'd you get that thing?" Koal nervously inquired.

"From a sorceress..." Venqas groaned, knowing this wasn't going to be fun. A blinding white light consumed him and Koal like an explosion. When it cleared, Venqas stood alone, his clothes now black and purple like Koal's scales. He had two dragon-like wings with pink webbing sprouting from his back and his eyes had turned yellow, just like Koal's.

"Uh, Venqas?" Turbo's eyes widened at the sight of this, his mind racing to find a possible explanation.

"What just happened?" Venqas asked, his voice sounding like he and Koal were talking at the same time. "And why do I feel so... weird?" He spun around to see his reflection in a panel of glass on one of the machines. His eyes blazed open and he exclaimed, in the same overlapped voice,

"Augh, I've turned into Venqas!" He grabbed his head, shook it and said, "Wait, why'd I say that? _I'm _Venqas." He grabbed his head and shook it again, "No I'm not, I'm _Koal_! Not some spiky-haired, whiny, apathetic-" He shook his head again, "Why am I saying this? I'm not a-" Turbo grabbed the mutated Venqas and pulled him out of the way of the robot firing a devastating laser at him,

"I don't know what the hell's going on, but you two getting blasted won't help at ALL." Turbo quipped.

"Two? What do you mean 'two'?"

"Don't you get it? Koal, Venqas -you two were fused together by that weird hoodie!"

"Wait, I'm in Venqas' body?" Koal gasped, her mind almost unable to comprehend what was happening. Turbo regrouped with his allies and stood the Venqas-Koal hybrid up.

The boy and the dragon's minds overlapped as they struggled for control of their new body.

"Hey, stop pushing!" Venqas snapped.

"You stop crowding me!" Koal barked back.

"It's _my _body!"

"_You _did this to _me_!"

Triana, Lance and Rokka looked on, confused at Venqas yelling at himself.

"Venqas and Koal got fused by some magical powers of tailoring." Turbo didn't have time to explain in-depth, as there was a monster that was trying to kill them. Not that he had any idea how this happened, or why it happened for that matter.

"Okay, while Ven-Koal goes crazy, let's scatter and go for that robot dude." Lance didn't have time for this. "We defeat him and, in theory, the giant Heartless should stop working."

"Sounds good to me." Rokka nodded.

"But not to me." Triana detested the idea of leaving her two best friends trapped like this. "Poor Venqas and Koal... we need to figure out what the hell happened!"

"There's no time!" Lance snapped. "We have bigger problems!"

"If Koal and Venqas are in trouble, that's the biggest problem in my book!" Turbo barked.

"Um, not that I'm complaining, but how come the Heartless hasn't been attacking us this past minute?" Rokka asked.

The gant Heartless was still as a statue as Sigma angrily mashed some buttons on a remote control.

"Stupid glitches! I know this thing's programming isn't complete yet, but I didn't expect it to randomly go into _standby_ during _combat_!" Sigma grunted in a fit of rage.

"You two go attack the Heartless, we'll help Ven-Koal." Turbo whispered to Lance and Rokka. The two rebels nodded their heads in agreement and charged the glitching monster. Turbo and Triana ran over to the Venqas-Koal hybrid, which was struggling with having two minds in only one body.

"Venqas, buddy? You okay in there?" Turbo called, not sure what good it would do him.

"Not really..." Venqas responded in a pained grunt.

"Koal, what's going on?" Triana asked, trying to see if she could get the two to calm down.

"I'm not sure, but it's like Venqas and I are the same person now..." Koal groaned in despair. "And it sucks..."

All of a sudden, a blast of energy nailed Turbo and Triana from behind, sending them flying into the wall. The robot Heartless approached Venqas/Koal, causing them to try to run away, but the lack of coordination between their two minds caused them to flop over onto the ground, landing face first and frantically struggling to get back up. Lance and Rokka began to attack the Heartless furiously in an attempt to get it away from Ven-Koal.

"No... this can't be the end..." Venqas thought as the Heartless cast a shadow over his altered form. "My life... my friends... all for nothing... I'll be a casualty in a war I shouldn't even be part of..."

"Shut up! We can still win this!" Koal barked.

"No we CAN'T! We're trapped in a form we can't control without working together! And thanks to you, _that's_ out of the question!"

"You're not one to talk! We're supposed to be heroes, yet you've done nothing but whine about having to risk your life!"

"Being smart-mouthed and rude doesn't accomplish much either!"

"At least I TRY to be a credit to the team! You're the Keyblade master, which makes you the most important guy here! But you act as if you're just being dragged along for the ride even though you CHOSE to come with us! You're being a baby when literally _everyone_ needs you to be a man!"

"Well, I'm_ SO VERY SORRY_ that verbal abuse isn't a form of mediation where I'm from! I might not be brave or useful, but at least I'm not picking on the member of the group who lost his parents, his home and everything that meant anything to him and then got drafted into a war that he never wanted to be part of and has no way out of!"

"That happened to me too, in case you haven't noticed! I lost everything too, but do you see ME brooding over it? Do you see _Turbo_ brooding over it? We're trying to make the most of this situation. Hell, Triana's more willing to be part of this than you, even though her world's still intact and she's _royalty_ back there! She had the most to lose by going along with this. And yet she's on the team, risking her life because unlike you, she cares about people other than herself!"

"I... I..." In a sudden turn of emotions, Venqas was close to tears, "I care about YOU... and Triana and Turbo... why do you think I went with you guys when the Herald gave me an offer to stay in Hyrule?"

"You... really?" Koal was astonished to find that Venqas wasn't as self-centered as she had made him out to be,

"And you know, I came to save you even though you were being such a bully..."

"I... well... I guess I thought Turbo had dragged you along..." Koal was taken by complete surprise, "It's just that it's hard for me to think of you as selfless or brave when you've been complaining about having to risk your life so much. I know you're scared for your life, but you don't need to whine all the time; It gives us a negative image of you."

The robot blew away its attackers and refocused on Ven-Koal.

"We're going to have to clean up our act when this is over." Venqas sighed, "But we're not gonna let this bucket of bolts kill us, are we?"

"No way!" Koal agreed with Venqas for the first time.

**Chapter 35: Scrapped Nightmares**

The metallic monster Heartless pointed its finger cannons at the fused hero/heroine with the intent of finishing them off with a devastating laser blast, but the young warriors weren't having any of that.

"Fly us outta here!" Venqas ordered Koal, their minds now working in tandem.

"I'm on it!" Koal complied. The wings on Venqas' back spread, flapped and lifted the body off the ground. Venqas summoned his Keyblades and faced the robot,

"What now? How do we fight it? None of our attacks worked before!"

"Maybe we have an attack in this form that can affect it!"

"What? That's ridiculous!"

"I'll believe anything at this point!" Koal had seen many crazy things today, so she was forced to succumb to the chaos she was consumed in. The Heartless blasted its energy cannons at the combined heroes. Ven-Koal pulled up to avoid the attack and swooped in at the mechanical monstrosity. Venqas swung his Keyblades, leaving a gash in the monster's armor. The Heartless retaliated with another blast of white-hot energy, striking Ven-Koal point-blank and consuming them in a blinding explosion. However, when the smoke cleared, the fusion merely laughed off the attack,

"That all ya got, tin man?" Venqas was surprised to find himself quipping. Or was it Koal who was making the joke?

"It can't be!" Sigma gasped, his 'ultimate' weapon turning out to be -like most things labeled as such- anything BUT ultimate.

"It most certainly can." Triana pointed her Master sword to the back of his head. Turbo brandished his hammer, Lance pointed his gunblade at the villain and Rokka just stood around with his arms crossed, trying to look "badass." "Call off the monster or we'll sell you for scrap metal."

The robot Heartless stopped in its tracks due to its controller being in a position where if he tried anything funny he'd be a hood ornament by nightfall.

"Now's our chance!" Koal saw that the Heartless was vulnerable and had no intention of fighting fair. "Let's melt this robot Heartless!"

"Yeah, let's see if your powers mix well with my magic..." Venqas pointed his Keyblades at the robot, Koal imagined herself breathing fire, and all of a sudden, the Keyblades unleashed a blast of all-consuming fire upon the monstrosity. It began to stumble backwards and crash into a wall. Ven-Koal flew up to the downed Heartless and slashed away at it with the Keyblades again and again, cutting out more and more chunks of metal until all that remained was a useless pile of shadowy scrap metal. The remains of the Heartless began to disintegrate like any other slain Heartless. A glowing-blue heart-shaped object floated out of the remains and slowly vanished into nothingness.

"Yeeaaahhh!" Venqas and Koal roared in triumph.

"Looks like your super-special robot just got smashed." Lance taunted Sigma, holding him a gunpoint. "It's over."

"Not by a longshot!" Sigma created a portal of darkness below him and sunk into it. Turbo attempted to dive in after him, but the robot had fully submerged into the darkness, which then closed behind him, causing the young hedgehog to land on his face.

"What?" Turbo roared in frustration, "He can do that? That's just cheating! There's gotta be a 'no vanishing into darkness rule' somewhere, right?"

"If there was, I doubt they'd follow it, what with being bad guys and all..." Triana shrugged, trying her hand at being snarky for once

Turbo noticed a glow coming from the evaporating wreckage of the robot. He dashed over to it and where once stood a formidable foe was a glowing green jewel.

"What's that?" Ven-Koal asked.

"It's a Chaos Emerald." Turbo picked up the green jewel. "These things are gems that hold a mysterious power called Chaos Energy. Legend has it that when all seven are collected-"

"Um, not that I don't enjoy sharing a brain with Venqas, but how are we supposed to change back?" Koal interrupted, more worried about her predicament than Turbo's glowing rock. All of a sudden, the combined form began to glow. Venqas began to stop hearing Koal's thoughts run through his head, and likewise, Venqas' thoughts were now silent to Koal and in a flash of light, Venqas and Koal were separate again, as if they'd never fused at all.

"Well, that was weird." Venqas looked to his back, glad to be rid of the wings. "But I'm glad it's over..."

"It's good to have our thoughts to ourselves again." Koal chirped, happy to be back down to one crazy voice in her head.

"Let's get the hell outta this place." Lance called. "We destroyed their pet project and there's no one here to man the factory. Our mission here is done."

"Shouldn't we destroy the machine that makes the Heartless first?" Koal looked to the dark crystal on the sinister machine, still puzzled as to why no one had taken care of it before.

"No, the crystal is still too dangerous. We have no idea what could happen if we broke it."

"Well, how's THIS for an idea?" Koal blasted the crystal with her lightning breath, making the dark gem glow like the sun and explode into a thousand tiny shards that fell like rain, some of them pelting Koal and, unbeknownst to her, melding into her body like a rock in quicksand. She turned to Lance with a smug grin, "See? Wasn't that easy?"

"Well, I for one feel stupid." Lance remarked with a lighthearted grin, "Guess they didn't have a dragon all those years ago. C'mon, let's blow this dump."

As the heroes headed for the exit, Triana couldn't help but feel that they were forgetting something...

**Writer's Note:**

Thanks to my buddy, Alex for making up that giant Heartless for this story. It seems like all my friends are helping me out with this fanfic, which I appreciate.


	13. Didn't See That Coming

** Chapter 36: True Power**

The heroes exited the factory, hoping to never return to that foundry of nightmares again. The triumphant group of adolescents were greeted by a sky purged of the depressing gray clouds that once dominated it -as if defeating Sigma had somehow dispelled the veil of downtrodden. Triana found herself fixated on the Chaos Emerald that Turbo had taken from what remained of the giant Heartless. She was mystified that a simple jewel could fuel such a monstrosity. She looked to Turbo, her mind thirsted for answers about this powerful trinket and asked Turbo about the jewel that he now casually threw to himself like a baseball.

He took a deep breath and answered, "The Chaos Emeralds are seven jewels that contain a powerful energy source called 'Chaos Energy.' If someone gets their hands on one 'a these, you can bet that they're not just collecting gemstones -Chaos Energy can act as an unlimited power source for just about anything."

"If that's true why weren't the bad guys using it to power the Eclipse Cannon?" Triana inquired.

The blue hedgehog casually shrugged, "Heck if I know. Guess they thought 'defective prototype killer robot' was a cut above 'doomsday weapon.'"

"Their strategists must be defective as well." Koal smirked, overhearing the conversation.

"Well, that's their problem, 'cause the emerald is more than just an unlimited-use battery; a lucky few -myself included- can use the emeralds to preform a technique called 'Chaos Control', which can be used to warp space and time."

Koal jokingly accused Turbo of making up being able to warp space and time, but he insisted that it was the truth. Triana also pointed out that warping space and time could be very useful, but Turbo responded, quite evasively,

"Well, see, the thing is, it takes a while to use, and I don't really have much practice with it."

"So, in short, you can't do it..." Being smug was something that was simply within Koal's nature, like a dog barking or a baby crying.

Triana had noticed that it was somehow getting darker. She looked up to the sky to see if the sun was still present, or if the moon was about to rise and curse her to become a wolf once more. But instead of the sun or the moon, she saw- no, it couldn't be! By some demonic happenstance, the Space Colony ARK was now closer to the planet than before! And unless her eyes deceived her, it was getting closer and closer by the second!

"Everyone! Look!" Triana cried, pointing her finger at the satellite. Her allies' eyes blazed up to the giant-ass-satellite-laser as it plummeted closer and closer to them like a malicious, metal meteor. A wave of fear splashed across the heroes, turning their blood to ice in their veins.

"Okay, they can't fire it, but they can drop it on us?..." Turbo's heart jumped into his throat as he came to the conclusion that the villains were deliberately trying to abuse loopholes in the unwritten rules.

"If that thing crashes here, it'll wipe out the entire city!" Venqas exclaimed as his heart pounded like that of a running cheetah.

"It's all over..." Lance sighed, resigning to his fate, knowing that he was powerless against such a colossal force. Venqas on the other hand wasn't willing to have come this far to die now,

"We gotta stop that thing or Hollow Bastion's done for!" He bellowed.

"HOW?" Koal cried, her life flashing before her eyes. "Throw something at it?"

Turbo glanced to the Chaos Emerald in his hand and raised a curious eyebrow. An ember of hope flittered in his's eyes. Wheels in his brain began to turn, "Yeah... throw something at it..." Turbo faced the Heartless factory, raised the Chaos Emerald high above his head, took a deep breath and clenched the emerald as hard as he could. The emerald began to spark with an ancient energy that glowed like a emerald green sun. The factory became shrouded in a fiery aura of the same color. The heroes all took a few steps back, utterly clueless as to what was happening.

"Um... Since when can Turbo do this?" Venqas asked, trembling as the air became charged with mystical energy. Koal resisted the urge to retort, "since when can you fuse with others using a piece of cloth?", but only because her jaw had already dropped too far to form a coherent sentence.

Turbo jammed his eyes shut, focusing all of his inward power into one technique. The lives of his friends hung in the balance, as well as those of the people of Hollow Bastion. His ember of hope blazed into a firestorm of determination. He thrust the hand holding the emerald forward and roared, "CHAOS CONTROL!"

The emerald let off a radiant green flash and the factory vanished in a blink of mystifying emerald-green light. A split-second later, a flash of the same color rang out from the sky, drawing the heroes to look up. The factory now reappeared in the sky, flying at the Space Colony Ark like it had been flung by a mile-wide catapult. The factory slammed into the base of the Eclipse Cannon, causing the space station to explode like a skyscraper-sized firework. The heroes covered their eyes and ears, the explosion being bright and loud enough to blind any who would dare look at it as well as relieve their ears of use. When the light cleared, the heroes were surprised to see that the giant-ass-space-laser had been utterly and completely destroyed.

"I... I can't believe it..." Lance was astonished, seeing the mighty Eclipse Cannon reduced to space debris.

"So THAT was Chaos Control..." Triana remarked, having had no notion that Turbo's special technique was so powerful.

Turbo panted like a dog, visibly worn and about to pass out. He attempted to prop himself up with his hands on his knees. Koal, Triana and Venqas ran to his side as Rokka and Lance looked on.

"Are you okay?" Koal could see the hedgehog's exhaustion as easily as the moon on a starry night.

Turbo forced himself to answer, struggling not to faint in the process, "Rrgghhh... not really... Chaos Control wears me out since I'm not very experienced with it. And doing something as big as chucking a factory into a satellite... I'm lucky it didn't kill me... but if I hadn't done it, where'd you all be?"

"You could've killed yourself doing it, but you did it because you had to..." Venqas now understood what Turbo's world view was -your friend's lives are more important than your own, to the point that almost dying would be a triviality if it meant saving them. _That_ was what he himself had lacked all this time -a sense of altruism. He wasn't scared, he wasn't weak, his problem had been that he just needed to stop thinking about himself for once. He closed his eyes, smiled and nodded, as if to say, "Now I understand."

A smug, triumphant grin was able to make its way onto Turbo's muzzle before he gave into the seductive embrace of his own exhaustion and collapsed, frightening his teammates, as if he'd been shot dead before them.

"Turbo? Are you okay?" Koal frantically shook the young hedgehog, as though she were trying to bring a corpse back to life. "Don't do this to us! C'mon, say something funny! Come on!" A tear began to creep its way down her cheek. "Please... please be okay..."

Venqas couldn't help but remember back in Hyrule when Koal exhausted herself with her fury power, specifically how worried Turbo was about her. This was like deja vu, but this time, it was Koal who was frantically trying to ensure that Turbo was all right.

Triana felt Turbo's forehead, which was as hot as flames of Koal's breath. "He's running a serious fever! We need to get him to a doctor!"

"Merlina!" Venqas exclaimed, "She has healing magic!"

"Who's Merlina?" Triana asked.

"I'll explain on the way!" Venqas could have used his healing magic, but he wanted an excuse to go to Merlina's house to give her a piece of his mind for not warning him about what his hoodie was capable of back in the Heartless factory.

**Writer's Notes: **

I dreaded posting this chapter, since I was worried that readers would think that the inclusion of Chaos Control would make Turbo too powerful to continue being an interesting character. Call me paranoid, but I practically re-wrote this chapter three times because I was so worried about getting reviews that used the terms "Mary Sue," "overpowered," "Deus Ex Machina," etc. Anyway, that's why it took me so long to post this chapter (also, sorry about the overly long writer's notes).

**Chapter 37: The Price of Failure**

In a location unbeknownst to our heroes, the enigmatic hooded man, Kixur sat on a granite throne, flanked by two black torches that remained unlit, as Sigma explained his defeat at the hands of the heroes and their allies. The room was dark and damp with cold granite walls, fitting for one who commanded the darkness to act as his personal army. Next to Kixur was a pitch-black dragon about as large as him that sat like a dog at her master's side as he heard of Sigma's failure.

"You've failed me, Sigma..." Kixur's voice was frustrated, but calm. "You've lost four assets that we worked very hard to obtain. Powering the Eclipse Cannon took a lot of dark magic in place of the Chaos Emeralds, which you also had the bright idea to use as an experimental power source for the giant Heartless -might I add that according to your recollection of what happened, it was also an ineffective power source. And don't even get me started on the factory..."

"I suppose that you have lived up to your reputation of being defeated time and time again..." The dragon spoke, her voice like that of an evil empress raised by Koal and Merlina.

"It-it wasn't my fault!" Sigma attempted to argue his case, which was a waste of breath when it came to one such as Kixur. "I had those little punks where I wanted them, but then that boy with the Keyblade and the dragon-" The dragon's eyebrow raised like drapes on a window at the mention of another dragon.

"No excuses." Kixur beamed at Sigma, causing the robot to stop his sentence, like using an electric collar on a barking dog. He stood up, held his hand out at Sigma and a cloud of shining black flames began to gather at the tips of his gloved finger. The man asserted, "Failure is not without its consequences..." Sigma braced for his destruction, expecting to be blasted into a million pieces of scrap metal as painfully as Kixur saw fit. All of a sudden, the flames dispersed. Beneath his hood, Kixur formed a lighthearted smile and laughed in a playful tone, "You should've seen the look on your face!"

"You're not going to destroy him?" The dragon asked her master, confused by this sudden show of mercy.

"Why should I? It's not like he'll be more useful to me as a pile of scrap metal." Kixur's voice had gone from foreboding and sinister to cheerful and snarky, surprising Sigma that his mood did not receive whiplash damage in the process. "And look on the bright side, the Heartless was a _prototype._ Its defeat was a GOOD thing -we can iron out the bugs and try it again."

"You aren't punishing me for failure?" Sigma wasn't sure if Kixur was letting him off easy or if he was faking him out.

"I've seen your track record, and I'm honestly not surprised that you lost." Kixur condescended to Sigma to the point that the robot wondered if THIS was his punishment. "Sure you lost, but you got away in one piece, which means you're still worth something."

"You're letting him off the hook for such a catastrophic failure?" The dragon was breathless at her master actually showing compassion towards a subordinate.

"Punishing minions for failure doesn't fix things, Maleficent..." Kixur glared to his dragon. "That's not how I work. I say keep him around, just don't send him on important missions again."

"I will never understand you." Kixur's dragon, Maleficent sighed.

Kixur responded, with a sly tone, "You never did."

"What should I do now?" Sigma asked, not having expected to last this long after failing on such an epic scale.

"Spend the rest of the night as you see fit."Kixur responded, lazily. "I've got more plans to set in motion. Ones that don't involve you." Kixur motioned for a dark portal to appear before him, and responded to his command like a slave would. He glanced to Maleficent and Sigma. As he vanished into the portal he remarked with a snide tone, "Don't go talking about me behind my back."


	14. Worse than a school morning

**Act 3: Loose Cannons**

**Chapter 37: Worse Than Getting Up For School**

Koal's eyes pulled themselves open as she awoke from an uncomfortable slumber. She had been having more and more nightmares since she had lost her world to the Heartless. How long had it been? A week now? A week full of fights for her life, overly-complicated explanations of overly-complicated situations. Putting up with Turbo's antics, Triana's clumsiness and Venqas' whining. Perhaps the reason behind her recent increase of nightmares _wasn't_ so hard to understand.

The groggy dragon inspected her surroundings. She was in Merlina the Sorceress' house, laying on a couch with a sleeping Turbo. She remembered the night before: Venqas had brought them here so that Merlina could heal Turbo. She also recalled that Venqas had then attempted to return the hoodie that Merlina had given him, not wanting to unwittingly fuse with someone again. After some arguing, Venqas acquiesced, agreeing to keep the hoodie, but not wear it. After that, they stayed the night at Merlina's house, since they were all too tired to return to Lance's.

Koal's mind drifted back to the hoodie. And scarily enough, she couldn't blame Venqas for not wanting it. She could fault him for many things, but not that. Being merged with another person was like a nightmare -having someone else within your mind, not to mention that someone being the last person you'd want inside your head.

Speaking of whom, Venqas yawned as he himself awoke on an adjacent couch from a nightmare-riddled slumber. Of course, one could argue that with the nightmare that his life had become, he would have preferred to have stayed asleep.

Triana slept peacefully on the floor next to his couch, which would have been odd were she not a wolf. Venqas looked at Triana as she slept, knowing that she usually woke up when she reverted to human form. He couldn't wait to see her bright, sweet face again, if only because she was the only person on this "team" that wasn't a hyperactive cartoon animal or a smarmy fantasy creature.

He glanced over to Koal, stared for a moment and began to chuckle to himself. Koal looked up to notice that she had fallen asleep with her head resting softly upon Turbo's lap. Koal didn't understand why this caused Venqas to giggle like a cretin, but the fact that it did told her that it was most likely a suggestive position in his culture. She quickly pulled her head away from Turbo's lap and stood herself up like a dog.

"Good morning." She greeted Venqas, "Did you sleep well?"

"Nah, I had this strange dream..." Venqas rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, "I was in this black void, standing on a pedestal made of stained glass, fighting off a bunch of of Heartless with a sword, instead of my Keyblade. But the absolute weirdest part was that the stained glass was a mural of you."

"Must be an aftereffect from fusing with me, I guess." Koal shrugged.

"What WAS that place?" Venqas mumbled, not expecting an answer. "It was so bizarre..."

"Well, muttering about it won't answer any questions." Koal cheekily grinned.

"Yeah, you've got a point there." Venqas nodded.

Koal responded, "Good, because the fewer times you open your mouth, the better."

Ven's eyes blazed open, "Wait, come again?"

"Sorry, it kinda slipped out." Koal apologized, "I'm still trying to get it into my head that it isn't okay to make fun of you anymore because you're no longer a whiny b-" Koal cut off herself off mid- sentence and her mind raced to find a word that wouldn't be insulting. Alas, she was not a living thesaurus and could only say, "Boy... Uh, you're not a whiny-boy anymore."

"Gee, thanks a lot..." Venqas sighed as he rolled his eyes.

"Sorry..." Koal was still having trouble adjusting to having to be nice to someone who had been complaining non-stop until twelve hours ago -during eight of which he was asleep! Needless to say, her adeptness at being polite was not going to improve any time soon. "Dragons have a tendency to speak our minds, and we're very short-tempered creatures. May the ancestors help those who fall out of our favor..."

Venqas sighed, "And I fell out of your favor because I was being reluctant, whiny and all that other stuff that's still ringing in my ears..."

"To be honest, you never WERE in my favor." Koal's lack of progress with giving Venqas any respect was as obvious as the pink-webbed wings on her back.

"So what do I have to do to get INTO your favor?" Venqas asked.

"Well..." Koal didn't want to use the words 'whine' or 'complain', and telling him to be 'brave' or a 'team player' was too generic an answer for her tastes. She looked over at Turbo -who was still sound asleep- and remembered him nearly risking his life to destroy the Eclipse cannon and how he still kept a sense of humor afterward. She turned back to Venqas and responded, "I guess you could start by being a little more like Turbo."

"You want me to be a blue hedgehog?" Venqas asked, skeptically raising his eyebrow.

"No, Turbo's everything we need YOU to be." Koal stated, "He's brave, he's enthusiastic, he's assertive, he's selfless. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

A shimmer of mischief entered Ven's eye. "Yeah, I gotcha..." He grinned.

"Good."

Venqas smirked, "You have a crush on Turbo, don't you?"

"N-wai-wha-tha-gha-HUH?" Koal sputtered in shock, "You- you're kidding, RIGHT?"

"Yeah, I'm just kidding." Venqas chuckled, "See? I acted like Turbo. I made a joke!"

"I...I guess I can't argue with that..." Koal sighed, taking a breath of relief. "But one intergalactic orphaned warrior to another, leave being sarcastic to the experts."

"Who died and made you- ah, you're right..." Venqas had to admit that he wasn't great with sarcasm -at least not the lighthearted kind. Plus, between Turbo and Koal, it wasn't like they had a shortage of snarky commenters.

The thumping of a fist against the wooden front door rang out, accompanied by a voice yelling,

"Ding-Dong!"

"What the hell?" Koal asked. "Who could that be at this hour?"

"I have no idea..." Venqas answered. "I'll go check..." He got off the couch and made his way over to the door. He opened it to see a man who was in his late-teens or early twenties, -but was no taller than he was- wearing a blue t-shirt, baggy pants rolled up to his shins and a white cap. He threw a glass bottle to Venqas, who was able to catch it, but barely -the cold, damp glass being difficult for anyone who hadn't been gripping the handle of a sword for the last two days.

"Nice 'ands, buddy." The man said with an accent that sounded like Turbo's impression of a baseball player.

"Um... what is this?" Venqas asked, inspecting the bottle, finding it to be full of a white liquid.

"It's milk, dummy." The man responded. "I'm the milkman, duh."

"Oh, uh, of course..." Venqas sure felt stupid. The white cap, the bottle of milk, it should have been obvious that this guy was a milkman. "I'm from, uh, out of town. Milkmen where I'm from don't really look like you do."

"Yeah, uh, where's my tip?"

"Tip?" Venqas patted his pockets. His pockets had a few things in them, but whatever they had, it sure wasn't money.

The milkman grew impatient, "Whatsamatter, ya freaking stupid?"

"Uh, sorry, I'm kinda broke." Venqas replied, shrugging.

Upon hearing this, the Milkman brandished a dead fish with newspaper wrapped around the tail and declared, "I'm gonna beat on your skull 'til I hit tonsils!"

"Wait, why are you carrying a-" Venqas was cut off by the slapping of wet, slimy scales across his face.

"Y' like that, chucklenuts? I _wasted_ you!" The milkman boasted.

Venqas had been insulted, doubted and disrespected by his peers for the better part of this week, and now some stranger was just going slap him with a fish? If he was going to stop being everyone's whipping boy, he had to start standing up for himself.

Venqas wiped the slime from the fish off of his face and summoned his Keyblade, but this time, instead of the black, chain-covered one he had been using, he got the one that looked like a giant, silver house key with a golden cross guard and black leather handle. While he noticed the difference, he didn't really care -so long as he had a weapon, it didn't matter what it looked like.

Venqas' mind raced to make a witty quip like Turbo or Koal would. He finally spoke up, "Okay, punk, I got a tip for ya-" He thrust his Keyblade behind him and snapped into a fighting stance, "-Start running."

"Ooh, hoo, hoo!" The milkman gawked, "You got a giant key! Yeah, dat's intimidating."

"You got no idea..." Venqas was about to prepare a strike, but all of a sudden, shadows on the ground started moving around. "Oh, crud... not now..." Venqas knew what this meant -more Heartless...

**Chapter 38: Here We Go Again**

The shadows pulled themselves out of the ground and became three-dimensional. These were the common Heartless that Ven was used to mowing down by now, but the problem was that the milkman might get caught in the crossfire.

"What's with you?" The milkman asked, seeing Venqas staring behind him, ignorant of the Heartless.

"Look out!" Venqas called, pointing behind the milkman. "Heartless!"

Upon hearing the word "Heartless," the milkman spun around to see the walking shadows lumbering toward him and the key-holding boy.

"Ah, geez..." He groaned. "Okay, this does not look good here..."

Venqas gripped the Keyblade with both his hands, bent his knees and held his weapon diagonally. "Run!" He yelled to the milkman. "They're after me, save yourself!" The Heartless lunged at him, like a swarm of mosquitos out for blood. They were faster than the armored Heartless he had recently gotten used to fighting, meaning he had no time to cast Holy or Water. He swung his Keyblade and chopped through the front line of shadows, but he hadn't noticed that one had snaked its way behind him. The Heartless pulled itself from the ground and leapt at the young key-bearer, thinking that he would not react in time. He did not, but he didn't have to, because when he did notice the Heartless, it had been seared to ashes with a fireball that belonged to Koal, who had come to see what all the ruckus was about.

"You're welcome." Koal said with a puff of black smoke wafting out her mouth.

"Koal, you gotta get the others!" Venqas called, fending off another Heartless with his Keyblade. "We're under attack!"

Koal would have done just that, but Turbo and Triana were still asleep, and if they did wake up Turbo's energy would be still be too depleted to be of any help and Triana had not yet reverted to her human form (never mind that her ability to fight as a wolf was dubious at best.) But Merlina on the other hand...

Koal nodded her head and dashed inside to get backup. Venqas hoisted his Keyblade up, pointed it at the sky and roared,

"Holy!" A pillar of white light rained down around him, decimating any Heartless that were close enough to him. All of a sudden, more Heartless began to appear, donning bronze armor and twisted lances. He remembered facing these outside of the town's walls -before Lance showed up, that was- and that they were the most dangerous variety of Heartless he had faced thus far -though considering he had faced about four kinds, that wasn't saying much. But what he DID remember was that Koal's elemental powers didn't work on them, but what about his magic?

There was only one way to find out. Ven pointed his Keyblade at the Heartless and yelled, "Water!" He unleashed a torrent of raging water upon his opposition from the tip of his Keyblade, but judging by their reactions, it was the equivalent of trying to use a rubber ball as a demolition tool.

Koal appeared at the door with Merlina in tow. She was dressed, not in her sorceress robe, but a white t-shirt and gray sweat pants -all she could really put on when Koal was practically pulling her out the door. Venqas blocked one of the armored shadow's lances with his Keyblade and called to Merlina and Koal,

"Hey, a little help here?"

"I would like to, but this variety of Heartless is immune to magic." Merlina stated.

"Well my powers don't work on them either, so what are we supposed to do?" Koal didn't mean to yell, but the fact that there was a fight right in front of her that she had every right to join in, but couldn't due to the fact that her powers couldn't help, made her a _little_ more grouchy than usual.

"You've got your horns and claws..." Merlina remarked.

Venqas was knocked down by a sweep from another Heartless' lance and the two walked up to him, ready for the kill. However, Koal tackled both armored monsters, hurling them away from Venqas. Another tried to jab her and missed by a hair, allowing Koal to bite down into its arm and swing it into another Heartless, crushing them like tin cans.

"On your feet!" Merlina called, casting her Curagun spell on Venqas, restoring his vitality with a wave of rejuvenating warmth.

"Thanks, Merlina." Venqas said, getting back up.

"Look out!" Merlina exclaimed. Venqas looked up to see a Heartless about to chop him using its lance. He blocked it with his Keyblade, but the monster's strength surpassed his, trying to stave off this walking tin can was like trying to move a parked car with one's bare hands.

All of a sudden, a familiar saber jabbed through the creature's head. The Master Sword! Triana drove her divine blade through the Heartless' forehead, having awoken from the jarring of returning to her human form just moments ago and rushed to the fight upon hearing the noise from the battle.

The Hylain princess sliced the Heartless down the middle with her sacred sword, making its halves fall to the ground, forming a perfect 180-degree angle. If Turbo were present, he would have remarked, "I hope that thing likes math, 'cause it just got _bisected_!"

"Are you okay?" Triana asked,

"Y-yeah, I think so... thanks Triana." Venqas felt weak, having been saved a total of four times in this fight. And after having defeated that giant Heartless in the factory? This felt almost contradictory of his-

Triana chopped through another Heartless and Koal yelled at Venqas to quit daydreaming and fight. Venqas nodded his head and got up, slamming his Keyblade through the side of the Heartless that was closest to him and watched as it came out the other side.

The remaining Heartless then jumped away and returned to the shadows.

"Did we... win?" Triana asked.

"We?" Koal grinned, "Ven and I did all the-" All of a sudden, a black portal opened in the ground in front of them and a mysterious figure arose from it.

The enigmatic figure wore red, white and black armor with a heart-shaped hole in its chest that went clear through to the other side. Its white helmet had two red frills coming up on the back, originating from the sides and a blue gem gleamed on the front. Its face was almost human, but its eyes were glowing yellow. Out of the back the figure's helmet flowed a long, golden mane or hair. The figure bore an uncanny resemblance to Sigma in terms of build and the design of its armor.

"No..." Merlina whispered, horrified by the Heartless. Though the Heartless was not explicitly terrifying, Merlina shivered as if she was looking into the eyes of a ghost rising from the grave of a close friend.

A murderous smirk worked its way onto the Heartless' face and it pulled a device resembling a flashlight from a box on its back. It then clenched the handle and a green beam of energy rose from the hilt, creating a blade of pure plasma.

Before the heroes could prepare themselves, it rushed Venqas and knocked him back with its shoulder. It swung its sword at Triana, who blocked it with her Master Sword. The Heartless then kicked her back, making her fall on Merlina.

Koal unleashed a deadly funnel of green poison onto the Heartless. She then followed up with a deadly blast of lightning, which would have been enough to fry anything else. But not this monster. It moved like a bolt of lighting, grabbed Koal by the neck and hoisted her up. The dark one's grip was like something unto an iron vice. Koal could not breathe her elements, or even make a snarky remark. The Heartless' eyes met hers. It did not say a word, but Koal could tell that it was thinking "You're not so tough when you can't use your mouth. Now, pray to your higher beings, as I'm going to crush your throat like a pine cone in front of your friends... and when their grief over your departure has fully eaten away at them... I'll kill them too..."

Koal tried to claw the ironclad Heartless, but her claws merely scratched the paint on its dark armor. She felt her throat being compressed and crushed. Koal couldn't stop it... tried as she could, there was nothing within her power to stop it. She knew in this moment that what stared her in the eyes was not just a mere Heartless like she was used to. It was death.

**Chapter 39: Metal Madness**

"Leave her alone!" Turbo's voice rang out. The Heartless stopped crushing Koal's jugular long enough to turn to the doorway of Merlina's house, where a visibly tired Turbo jeered at it to leave the black dragon alone and come after him instead.

"You and me, bucket-head, bring it on!" Turbo barked. The Heartless raised an eyebrow, as if to say, "why should I waste my time on you when I've got someone else on the ropes?" Turbo then smirked and called, "C'mon, don't-cha wanna take down the guy who trashed your factory, stole the Chaos Emerald and smashed your satellite-laser-doohickey? I bet that'll look a LOT better on your Heartless-resume' than just gutting a measly, little smart-mouthed she-dragon."

The Heartless grinned as it hurled Koal to the side and lunged at Turbo. As the young dragoness slammed against a wall she felt a breath of relief, knowing that she had been spared from the worst fate she could think of. Not by divine intervention, but by Turbo's own cockiness and selflessness. As she hit the ground, she then felt fear, knowing that the weakened Turbo was no match of the Heartless and that he had thrown his life away.

The Heartless slammed Turbo's head against the door, causing him to grunt back in defiance,

"Rrr... that all ya got?"

The Heartless grinned, hoping to turn Turbo's own jeer against him, but suddenly, he felt an overwhelming pain blast through his stomach cavity. Triana had stabbed her Master Sword through the monster's back and out of its stomach. She felt like laughing, using the Heartless' preferred method of attacking a preoccupied foe from behind against one of their own.

The Heartless released Turbo, but instead of falling down dead, it attempted to push the blade back out.

Back in Merlina's house, Venqas got up, hoisted his Keyblade into the air and cast Cure on himself. He bathed in a warm, soothing wave of light, and when it was done, charged back to the fight. The Heartless forced Triana's blade out of his torso and turned his attention to her. But, suddenly, Venqas blasted the monster with his water spell, pushing it away from Triana with a blast of rushing, freezing water.

Turbo then whipped out his Piko Piko Hammer and rammed the Heartless with it, pushing it into a wall and pinning it with all his might.

"Wait... didn't Turbo get his head smashed against the wall like five times?" Koal wondered, observing the hedgehog, "How the heck is he still STANDING, much less fighting?"

Turbo's legs began to wobble, as his exhaustion began to strangle his will to fight. He had expended too much energy yesterday to fight now, but he had to try his hardest not to let his friends down!

Triana looked at Turbo and turned to Venqas. "Ven, I'm gonna go help Turbo finish off this monster, you help up Merlina and have her use her magic to get Koal back on her feet!"

Venqas reflected that Triana didn't know about his own healing magic, but the point was moot as he couldn't muster up any more magic at the moment. He nodded his head, "I'm on it!"

Triana charged over to the Heartless, drawing her sacred sword to finish this servant of evil.

Venqas dashed over to Merlina and extended his hand to her. She took his hand and he hoisted her up.

"Thank you." She said, dusting herself off.

"What are you waiting for?!" Venqas yelled, "Use your magic! Kill that thing!" The Heartless grabbed Turbo's hammer and threw him back into the incoming Triana. It proceeded to make a dash for Venqas and Merlina, hoping to slice them both in two with a single stroke. Koal attempted to sear the Heartless with her fire breath, but it dashed through the cloud of fire as if it were mere steam.

"Damn!" Koal thought, "What the hell is wrong with me? My powers aren't working on _anything_!"

As the Heartless neared Venqas and Merlina, Venqas held his Keyblade sideways and thrust it at the monster's sword, blocking a downward slice that would have killed him in an instant.

"Anytime you're ready!" Venqas yelled to Merlina, trying with all his might not to let the Heartless overpower him.

"Okay, watch how it's done!" Merlina called, summoning her staff, which brimmed with power as she readied a spell. She took it in hand, raised it up and called, "Bind!" Tentacles of light crept up around the Heartless' feet, holding it down like an anchor. Ven took a few steps back asMerlina cast another spell, "Stone!" The Heartless then shrieked a ghastly wail as every inch its ebony, iron flesh began to mutate into cold, lifeless stone. Within seconds, it was nothing more than a frozen, immobile statue. Merlina readied for the finale and she bellowed, "Collapse!" The stone then began crack, releasing beams of light from the cracks. The stone let out a final wail as it shattered and crumbled, leaving naught but a pile of rubble behind. The heroes were exasperated, unable to believe that such a powerful enemy could be destroyed so utterly and completely.

"Whoa..." Venqas gasped, just short of being speechless at how potent Merlina's magic truly was. "That was...brutal..." Merlina glanced over to him. "Not that that's BAD thing..."

"Well, you know what they say, 'success' and 'excess' rhyme for a reason." She giggled with a playful smile.

"I've honestly never met anyone who's ever said that." Venqas remarked, raising an eyebrow.

"Well, you have now." Merlina retorted. She waved her staff and casted Curagun on Venqas, Turbo, Triana and Koal. The heroes were treated to a warm, green bath of healing light that restored their lost strength. Turbo leapt up from his sprawled out position, sprang into the air and landed by slamming down onto the ground next to Venqas and Merlina feet-first.

"Whoa!" Venqas exclaimed. "What was that about?"

"Just my way of sayin' I'm back in the game." Turbo grinned. He then looked at what remained of the Heartless, pointed at it and laughed, "Looks like someone's been taken for _granite!_"

Venqas and Merlina planted their faces into their palms.

As Triana got up, she noticed that the Heartless had dropped his sword, which remained intact despite its wielder being annihilated. She walked to the pile of rubble, stooped over and picked up the sword. The blade was a vibrant, neon green, a shade of the color that Triana had not seen before on her world. The technology of this weapon was beyond her understanding. How could a blade made of pure energy cut, or even exist? And why could Venqas' Keyblade as well as her Master sword deflect it? Was it due to the power of light, or was the blade itself solid?"

She waved the sword to the left and then to the right. Upon her moving the blade, it let off pounding waves of light in its wake. It was astounding to her, mesmerizing even. The weapon's sleek, advanced, yet simple design was very appealing, but how was she to sheathe it? She then felt a trigger-like button on the hilt. On a whim, she pressed it and the blade of plasma retracted into the hilt.

"Well, looks like Triana's got herself a new toy." Koal smirked.

Triana looked at Koal, then looked at the weapon. She clicked the button and the glowing blade shot out. She looked upon the blade and grinned, "Indeed, I do..."


End file.
